Dual Booting redhat in HP Elitebook 8470w

[sandeshhp]

Dear HP support team I was trying to dual boot red hat OS in my current HP Elitebook 8470w . For this i created a new partition and tried both with NTFS and FAT32 file system. However my red hat OS could not detect the free space ?? Do i need to delete the HP tool and HP recovery partition so that red hat OS can detect my free space ? Is there any way i could install red hat in my windows 7 system ?? Regards, Sandesh

[Matti_Kurkela]

This is not "HP support team", but a world-wide forum of fellow HP users.

Since neither NTFS nor FAT32 fully support POSIX filesystem semantics, they are not really suitable filesystem types for a Linux root filesystem.

If you created a new NTFS or FAT32 partition, the RedHat installer does not see it as a "free space": it thinks it is an existing partition that is already in use by *something*. The fact that the partition contains no files is not important. The installer wants to see some *unpartitioned free space*.

So, just delete the new partition you created and try again.

Alternatively, you can choose to specify the partitioning manually and explicitly tell the installer: "I want you to overwrite this partition". It won't do that unless you specifically tell it to overwrite. Just be very very careful in choosing the correct partition to overwrite.