I published an installation guide (for OpenSuse OS) about an hour ago and so far 3 Windows users have mailed me asking for more details. Hence I’m going to dedicate this edition to explain how to do partitioning, if you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Disk Partition

In you are using Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7, go to control panel and select the option ‘Create and format hard drive partitions’ under the ‘Administrative Tools’ menu. You can easily find this if you are using the default view.

Since many users don’t like this view and they would have changed it to classic view (Windows XP type). In this case, select ‘Administrative Tools’ and then click on ‘Computer Management’.

A new window will popup and you can see your hard drive partitions there. In your case, you may be having only two partitions OS(C) and Recovery (D).

Right click on the OS drive and select ‘Shrink volume’. This will allow you to shrink the size of your default (current) windows partition and create a new disk partition for installing Linux OS.

Enter the details in the setting window that popped up. Please note that you need to enter only the value for the text box item – ‘amount of space to shrink’. If you want the new partition (for installing Linux) to be of 10 GB size, enter the value as ‘10240’. And click ‘Shrink’.

At this stage itself, you may create one more partition for using as it as ‘Linux Swap’. You may give the space as ‘256 MB’ or so. This will be also be used (formatted) by the Linux OS installer during installation.

If you do some mistakes here, you can use the ‘extend volume Wizard’ and join the partitions together. The same tool can be used for formatting the new partition.

Changes during Linux OS installation

When you install the Linux OS, you can opt for manual partition. Then, the installer will allow you to choose the partition you want to use. Select one of the new partitions (the large one) you created for Linux and set the mount point as ‘/’ by editing the partition. Now select the other one as swap. That’s it.

In the picture given below, the disk partitions are  listed as /dev/sda1 to /dev/sda4. And your Windows installation is in /dev/sda1 (as the formatting is NTFS) partition. You should not use this partition for installing the new Linux OS.

After installation you will find both Windows and Linux OS installed in your system. You can select the one you want to run. Have fun!