Duel booting XP and Linux on one HDD

[Richard Beer]

My HDD is 140, I have downloaded the ubuntu distribution of linux, i burned the ISO to a disc and booted it on my pc, however I was not able to install it onto my spare HDD as it was only 20GB and the HDD could not hold it. So I now wish to install it on my HDD that holds XP, it is 140GB. However I do not know how to partition drives nor do I have a very good understanding of it. Can anyone please help me on this matter?

 

[BillytheImpaler]

20 GB should be waaaaaaaaaay more than enough to hold an installation of Ubuntu. The installation I'm typing this on is consuming 2.2 GiB space after I've installed all my software on it. What made you think that it didn't have enough space?

 

[Richard Beer]

I got an error message saying not enough space, but ive formatted it from fat32 to NTFS, its compleltey blank, i wiped windows ME (cringe) off it, and so linux should be able to load onto it but i asked one of my friends and he says somthing about partitioning and telling linux to use all 20GB, but on the manually partition option it shows me lots of things i do not understand, overclocking, software, web programming i understand all stuff like that, but when it comes to partitioning im at a complete loss.

 

[Richard Beer]

the option of installing ubuntu on continous free space that should appear on the installation process does not appear when i try and put it on my 20gb drive

 

[Una]

It looks for unformated space to allocate automatically. So if you got it fully formatted as ntfs even if it is empty you still won't be able to automatically partition it.

 

[Richard Beer]

problem sorted now, the system wasnt recognizing it as 20gb because i had the jumper set wrong i set it to slave/w master and it isntalled. Now comes the next hurdle, getting the internet on it, im running on belkin 54g wirless router.