I want instal Linux on my computer that will live together with Windows Media Center Edition. I am running into two problems.

1) I cannot find a decent free disk partioning software that will work to create a partion for linux with out destroying my Windows partion. Would someone please help me find one.

2) My computer is nice and new with some good stuff on it. It has a SATA hard drive with 140GB of space, a Pentium 4 HT (Hyper Threading) 3Ghz, 512 MB of RAM, and a ATI Radion video card with 512MB. (Most of that was just to make you drool.) Anyway when I try to install Linux it cannot find my hard drive, I am thinking because it is a SATA hard drive not a IDE(PATA). What am i suposed to do?? A little help here please!!

The answer will entirely depend on which distribution of Linux you are using. For example, Ubuntu and Kubuntu are very user friendly in the setup. They both have GUI partitioning programs in the installer to make life easy, and you can keep your Windows installaltion. Other distros have a text based installer, which makes life a little harder, but I think if you get the Knoppix Live CD that has a GUI partitioner on it you can use, then take that disk out and put in the CD for your distro of choice.

As for the SATA problem it again depends on the distro. Certain ones will support more drives than others, and just because one distro will let you partition a drive, doesn't mean that others will install to it. Check which distros support your drive and the relevant chipset.

My god how much did that cost you? You can always go old school and use FDisk , but I'm not sure if that will let you resize partitions which is what you will probably have to do. The Linux Setup (depending solely on your distro you choose), might be able to do that.

Yeah i would recommend installing OpenSUSE and using their disk partitioning tools. It should recognize your SATA harddrive since it did for me. It has a very good user base so finding out how to fix problems if you dont know how is easy. Good luck and btw, my 2 year old laptop is almost identical to your desktop minus i only have 128 mb of video ram :-(

1) The installer included with your distribution will partiotion your hard disk for you. Be sure to tell it not to erase any existing partitions.
2) Your distro might not have the new enough drivers required for your hardware. I would think right now that the only way to solve that is to wait until a distro version with later drivers comes out

Thanks Guys!! (The computer cost me about 1000 dollars. OUCH)

well first if your partition is not big enough delete it in windows disc manager and make a new one thats bigger. Then you need to get SATA/RAID drivers for your linux distro if it dont support it on the disc or whatever. Then when your all done intstall linux. if it still does not work try using Xandros Open Desktop Linux thats the best linux ive come across so far, or if that does not work which it should downlaod a server edition of linux it will have the same functions but wil support SATA by default.

You had not told about your partitions.
Firstly if you can empty any of your partiotion then you can go to the windows disk management and delete that partition so that it is shown as a free space.
Incase you dont have a empty partition but have enough free space in any one of your partition then first defragment that partition and then you can use partition manager to resize it and can create a new partition from that free space.create the new partition with free space but do not format it.
second thing for the linux partitions , nowdays all the linux distributions have a graphical disk managers for example disk druid in redhat's enterprise editions and fedora.If you have free space(unpartitioned space not the free space of some windows(FAT/NTFS)partition) then you can select whether you want to create partitions automatically of manually.I will sugest to partition manually.For Redhat's EL and fedora you can create the following partitions:
boot = 100 MB (100 MB is enough for the boot partition)
swap = 1024 MB (Double of your Physical memory i.e. RAM)
home = 1-2 GB (this will hold your users files)
/ = 8-10 GB or more (root is the main partitions and it will hold your complete installation files)

Your SATA hard drive is not recognised by the linux you had tried to install. It may be due to the reason that earlier kernel doesnt have support for the SATA because SATA is a totally new technology. RED HAT 9 doesnt support it.So you have to get some newer versions that are with the latest 2.6 kernel.


Lastly about the distribution, there are many you can use any of them But i will suggest you FEDORA CORE .You can download it from ::
http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/

Fedora is a totally free distribution and it is updated regularly.Its release cycle is six months that means its new version is released in every six months and it comes with all the latest packages.Its installation is really very simple and its interface is also very user freindly