[fixabit]

So yesterday, being particularly angry at Microsoft for screwing over my ability to help my mom with her computer issues by removing NetMeeting from Vista (which she has) and making the replacement unuseable for XP (which I have), I decided to finally get off my butt and figure out how to dual-boot Linux and Windows so I can start switching over. I found a tutorial that I could understand here (for the most part!) and with pictures (those help! ), but every time I get to a certain part, I get stuck.

When I get to the section "dealing with partitioning", I choose the first option, shrink it down as much as possible (69%, would prefer not to use that much but otoh don't want to go messing about with things I don't understand), and tell it to start. It hangs at 0% for a long time, then an error message comes up saying "an error occurred while writing the changes to the storage devices - the resize operation is aborted." I googled around a bit and found one guy who said to go into applications/settings/settings manager/file manager/advanced tab/click blue configure link/uncheck "mount removeable drives when hot-plugged". That's the only answer I found that I could understand!! The rest just confused me. And that answer didn't help because I see Applications, but there is no Settings option, there or under Places or under System.

Help! I'm liking the look of this so far, running it from CD, but would really like to get it set up on my hard drive.

[Elvandil]

Can you explain what you are trying to do, with what, and what your goal is?

[fixabit]

I'm trying to get past the bit where it tries to partition a section off for it's own use, using the tutorial I posted a link to, so I can have a dual-boot of Linux and WinXP. Does that make sense?

[briealeida]

Do you have a USB key or some sort of external hard drive plugged in while you're doing this?

If so, try unplugging those and proceed from there.

[fixabit]

I haven't got anything actually plugged in, no - and I'm assuming having my iPod cord connected (but not the iPod itself) wouldn't do this?

Perhaps it'd be easier just to pay some local techie to set it up for me? I mean, aside from this issue it *looks* like a fairly short (therefore cheap) job, yes?

[emoric]

Originally Posted by fixabit

Perhaps it'd be easier just to pay some local techie to set it up for me? I mean, aside from this issue it *looks* like a fairly short (therefore cheap) job, yes?

I don't trust "techies".

[engti]

Which distro are you using?

you could verify the disk and check if it's been burnt properly.

and which volume/partition are you exactly trying to shrink?

i dont think the gnu partition manager can shrink NTFS partitions.