ineed to know how to makea partition to install mandrake becuse i cant doit throu the set up could some plz tell me how to wit out loseing data and has to be free

Yes you can. Look harder. Partition management is indeed a feature located in the Mandrake setup system.

Use Partition Magic to resize your windows partition, then let the mandrake installer do its thing on the free space.

never said i couldent find it i said it dident work or at least that what i ment and i defraged anddid disk clean up

Defrag and "Disk Clean" have no relevance to anything in this situation. But listen to Bliksem. Use a partition tool to create an empty partition that you can install Linux to.

can u name a partition tool?

partition magic

dident work dose ppl know how to do it safely wit out software or know of good software

Why didn't it work? Maybe if you tell us why we could help you figure it out.

But for other software. there's QTParted.

You are playing with fire here. Partition Magic is a good piece of software. I opt to use Partition Commander myself, never had a problem.

But that is not going to be your concern. Your concern is going to be user error and making a mistake and rendering your entire Windows install worthless. Then its going to be dire straights were you are scrambling around trying to fix your Windows installation to even be able to use any OS, let alone Mandrake.

Excercise prudence before continuing here. Make an image of your install as a backup and guard your ass before you step out on that limb. You dont seem to contain a lot of knowledge with PCs and any of these steps can potentially delete your entire install of Windows or even corrupt your MBR...

yah i havea lot of knowledge with pc`s justnever had to make a partition before ,ok.

I think that what Lokheed meant was the exact type of knowledge on partitioning and boot records that you seem to lack the experience with. All the Windows knowledge in the Microsoft Knowledge base, and all the knowledge regarding hardware will not be useful when it comes to determining paritions for Linux.

And his advice for a backup is sound. We get a lot of threads posted here where "I tried to do xxxx and now my drive doesn't boot! What do I do?", and the facts of the matter is that you should constantly have an up to date backup - especially when you are changing your partition data.

We are here to help, and I don't think any offense was meant.

Precisely. You can understand Windows through and through, but none of that transfers over to Linux.

Asking questions like "tell me step by step how to burn a cd" made me think you were relatively green when it comes to PCs. But like mark stated already, we are here to help. If I wasnt, I would have told you to boot with a floppy and fdisk your entire drive

In the end, you are at the end of your keyboard...just trying to make you understand that playing around with partitions is dangerous. You simply need to look around this forum for the plethora of "help, I tried to install Linux, now my Windows wont load" threads...

Perhaps if you tool a more informative approach and laid our your problems like kjordan suggests, we could help you more. Its hard to diagnose a problem with such limited information. We are all taking the time to help you, might as well take the time to sit down and write a well rounded post...no one liners.

But I digress. Here is a nice step by step on how to use PM. I know its v5, but you can transfer most of it to the latest version:

http://www.webtree.ca/newlife/using_partition_magic_5.htm

n/m i just gunna use my older computer it alredy has a partition it waz win 98 (xp now) and acompaq when thay made partitions for the recover thing (soooo long ago)