Dual-booting Fedora 12 on an HP 8530w
 

Hi! per the subject line, how do I reformat the single C: drive to make a new partition for Linux, w/out destroying the current Win7-64 installation?

Thanx!
AndyR

You don't want to format the drive if you want to keep win 7. I expect you are referring to the windows partition containing your operating system? You would need to first re-size (shrink) the win 7 partition, then create a partition on which to install Fedora. During the installation, you will be given options as to where to install Fedora. You may have to click on an Expert or Advanced tab to get this.

It would be helpful if you could post more information. Did you install windows 7 yourself? Is it OEM (pre-installed)? If you had windows 7 installed when you bought the computer, you may have several windows partitions, boot, filesystem and recovery? You could use the Fedora CD/DVD and log in as root user and run the command: fdisk -l (lower case Letter L) and post the output here so that we have your partition information and can give specific suggestions.

Thanx! This was originally an XP installation, and I installed the Win7-64 Enterprise upgrade.
I'm currently trying to get the Linux drivers from HP, as the laptop is still under warranty.
It's a model 8530w Elitebook, Dual-core 2.8Ghz w/ 4Gb RAM, nVidia Quadro card and 320Gb drive.
AFAIK there is only the one partition.
The Fedora 12 DVD was burned from the .iso file, downloaded last night. I haven't tried running ti on this machine, yet, since there is quite a bit to backup before starting this little project.

Let me answer with a suggestion, rather than try to squeeze Linux into your windows system disk which is not something too easy, I suggest you use a USB live linux.
I use the one from Fedora. You can download the application for Windows: https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/
Buy a 4GB USB key, less than 10 dollars these days.
run that application, and download with it Fedora 13 (Fedora 12 is old school today).

NB: you'll want to set 2GB of persistent storage.

Then reboot your PC (choose boot from USB in your BIOS) and you'll be on a Fedora PC that you can experiment with, install software, etc ...

I run a server this way since one year, it serves as dhcp, ftp, http and a few other things.

NB: if you move the USB stick to another pc, you want to clean /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules before.

Cool! Thanx. I am making the usb stick (8Gb), now. I do heavy duty grahpics: Maya, Softimage, Nuke, Mental Ray, Renderman, etc...so I'm loading up Fedora 12, x86-64, w/ 4Gb persistent storage. This will also need to work nicely with the nVidia quadro card in the laptop, and on the workstation.
I need this stuff to work solidly, so I tend to go one release behind the latest. In the immortal words of Dr. Jim Blinn, "I don't want the 'state of the art', I want something that works." (Dr. Blinn's name graces one of the shaders used extensively in CGI.).

hm, you're going to do heavy duty Linux usage here, with lots of data activity.
My experience is that usb keys tend to be too slow for this. I hope you got yourself a high speed key.

Also, updating rpms in Fedora will mean you download probably a gigabyte of update, and that will use up your persistent storage.

I tend to use my usb key for things that do not require much data movement, and it's also great for duplicating your system disk for your friends and colleague. I'm not sure your kind of usage will work nicely on the usb key, but it's worth a try.

Thanx! Ok...a couple of questions. The USB thing works (w/ 4gb persistance), but I can't get the nVidia card to be recognized, there is no audio, and it dosen't see the big disk. I have disks for both Fedora 11 and 12. How can I determine the partitions on this laptop? Is there a way to tell grub to shrink the windoze partition, and make one for the linux installation? Can I use the nVidia driver that comes from nVidia?
Thanx!

You can determine the partitions on your computer by running this command as root user, using your Fedora(or whatever) CD: fdisk -l (lower case Letter L) This outputs partition information which you can post here for more help.

Grub won't shrink the partition. It's a bootloader but Fedora should have a partition manager on the Live CD, probably GParted. I would advise you to try to shrink the windows 7 partition with some windows software, look in control panel under computer management, I'm not sure what the program is called.

Thanx, Yancek! HP informed me that they only support the laptop as a single-boot system. Either Windoze OR Linux. They only support the default SuSe installation. Default from the disk. No Linux drivers from HP!

Meanwhile, there is an issue with my workstation.
I just loaded up Fedora 11 on an HP6400, replaceing a Win7-64 installation with Fedora 11. Got the nvidia FX4500 card taken care of, and here is the question:

Palimpset Disk Utility is showing that the main HDD (250Gb ATA Western Digital) is failing. Read Error rate and ReAllocated Sector Count are both showing red-flagged FAILING notices.

This disk was totally(?) reformatted by the install process...is there anything I can do to fix the bad stuff?