first as a suggestion, dump red hat 7 and downlod fedora core II . much nicer as it is a lot like XP second: figure out which one OS you want to have loaded on your hard drive. messing around like his could mess up your HD permantly!!!! the easiest way is to install WinXP first. make sure you have room for your linux install. min of 6-8 Gb depending on what you install from the linux distro. if you don't have enough room on your HD, i would suggest some type of disk utility to remove the D & E partitions. or, tooos in your XP CD and do a fresh install. when it comes to partition size, create a partition size of 10 GB for windows. lave the rest free unpartitiond space. do your install of Xp and then put in your Linux Cd and follow the screen prompts. if your not sure, download the redhat install manual from their site. when it comes to the partitioning, choose automatic. if you want to do the manual way, read the following ********************************************* • A swap partition (at least 32MB) — swap partitions are used to support virtual memory. In other words, data is written to a swap partition when there is not enough RAM to store the data your system is processing. The size of your swap partition should be equal to twice your computer's RAM, or 32MB, whichever amount is larger. For example, if you have 1GB of RAM or less, your swap partition should be at least equal to the amount of RAM on your system, up to two times the RAM. For more than 1GB of RAM, 2GB of swap is recommended. Creating a large swap space partition will be especially helpful if you plan to upgrade your RAM at a later time. • A /boot partition (100MB) — the partition mounted on /boot contains the operating system kernel (which allows your system to boot Red Hat Linux), along with les used during the bootstrap process. Due to the limitations of most PC BIOSes, creating a small partition to hold these les is a good idea. For most users, a 100MB boot partition is sufcient. Warning Do not create your /boot partition as an LVM partition type. The boot loaders included with Red Hat Linux cannot read LVM partitions and you will not be able to boot your Red Hat Linux system. • A root partition (1.7-5.0GB)—this is where "/" (the root directory) will be located. In this setup, all les (except those stored in /boot) are on the root partition. A 1.7GB root partition will permit the equivalent of a personal desktop installation (with very little free space), while
