jordanrw wrote:

No i have no partitions that i have made on my vista drive. Two of those partitions are extremely small (as in almost non existent). I was just assuming those were read wrong by linux. I basically want the second harddrive to boot linux. I cant get it to install on it. Where can i get Acronis?

get gparted... it much better, its a live CD and of course its free (and, IIRC, the DL is like 20 megs (takes about 3 in over BitTorrent)
live cd version


or the live USB

So just use gparted to format my drive to EXT-3? And once again, how can i make sure that sda is my vista drive. Will gparted show me how much space is taken up. Because then it would be easy to figure our since my second drive is literally empty.

jordanrw wrote:

So just use gparted to format my drive to EXT-3? And once again, how can i make sure that sda is my vista drive. Will gparted show me how much space is taken up. Because then it would be easy to figure our since my second drive is literally empty.

gparted will do everything (it supports TONS of formats)

as for identifying the individual disks/partitions label them in windows (right click on drive in my computer then point to properties, set volume label)

those labels will be set and they will show up in Gparted.

Didnt realize this wasnt visual what commands do i use to format?

And BTW guys, thanks so much for your help so far. I really need this to work so thanks alot for the effort you are putting in to helping me.

Ok, apparantly i must be getting an error when running gparted becasue it is graphical. I have no clue what is worng. Is there somethign i need to know.

jordanrw wrote:

Ok, apparantly i must be getting an error when running gparted becasue it is graphical. I have no clue what is worng. Is there somethign i need to know.

its probably your Xorg conf.

what gfx card do you have? and the first part isint GUI, its a shell/DOS like setup thingy.

tell me exactly what happens when you try to run Gparted

nevermind the gparted thing i got the operating system installed, but i accidentally set vista as my default to load in the bootloader and it loads directly into vista. How can i change this

jordanrw wrote:

nevermind the gparted thing i got the operating system installed, but i accidentally set vista as my default to load. How can i change this

you accidentaly set vista to boot by default from Grub?

here is how to change the default grub OS

here

how to chane he amount of time GRUB menu shows up for

wow looks like things keep going wrong for me i got everything working last night even changing grub to boot into windows and so on. Before i went to bed i booted back into windows and left it there. So this morning i wanted to get into linux. Did a clean restart and when it restarted it just got to my Motherboard splash page and it keeps restarting the machine. The best i can do is get into teh bios or use the openSUSE DVD to get into recovery mode but i have no clue what to do from there. Any ideas what caused this and how to fix it?

jordanrw wrote:

wow looks like things keep going wrong for me i got everything working last night even changing grub to boot into windows and so on. Before i went to bed i booted back into windows and left it there. So this morning i wanted to get into linux. Did a clean restart and when it restarted it just got to my Motherboard splash page and it keeps restarting the machine. The best i can do is get into teh bios or use the openSUSE DVD to get into recovery mode but i have no clue what to do from there. Any ideas what caused this and how to fix it?

it sounds like your BIOS cant recognise the disk or cant read a loadable boot partitions. is there any specific messages that your BIOS is spitting out (you may have o disable something called the Full screen logo, which displays a pic instead of usefull debug info)

let me know if the bios says anything, otherwise use the suse recovery consle gto get to a grub prompt and reinstall the boot laoder