[tubes]

Hi everyone.
I have literally today just installed FreeSpire on my PC. it is currently running from a cd, however i would like to install it permanently on my machine. the problem is I have one hard drive, which is already partitioned for me when i bought it. wht I want to do is get the 142 GB capacity of it, and half it so i can use one half for linux, and one half for windows. i tried to use GNOME partition editor, but unfortunately i have no experience at this kind of thing. it comes up with an error message that says this:
Unable to read the contents of this filesystem!
Because of this some operations may be unavailable.

Did you install the correct plugins for this filesystem?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH SO CONFUSING!!
thanks.
tubes

[Elvandil]

Anything installed now? Maybe Linspire has no NTFS drivers.

In any case, you could use a different partitioner. If nothing is installed, start by removing all the current partitions.

CloneZilla GParted LiveCD (Complete partitioning and drive imaging/restoration tools)
Gparted LiveCD
Parted Magic

[RobLinux]

Does the PC have Vista? If so you can shrink it's partition. XP needs 3rd party software, gparted (& qparted with Live CD) or something like Partition Magic (or equivalent).

I would be very cautious, rather than force things (you do have a good backup don't you?) May be try a different recent distro, who may include what you're missing.

It is impossible to make good recommendation without more information, things like the output of dmesg on bootup is useful, copy & paste into browser Post/email compose window.