Examining Your Hard Drive

If you don't know which partitions are available, you can use Windows Administrative Tools to find out. On Windows XP, select Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management. The window shown in Figure 3-1 displays, showing the hard disks and their partitions.

Figure 3-1. Disk partition information in Windows 2000.

The display in Figure 3-1 shows two hard disks (C and D) and one CD drive (E). Each hard disk has one partition and some unallocated space. On drive C, the partition is 3.93GB, formatted with a FAT32 file system. The unallocated space is 3.94GB. Linux could be installed in the unallocated space on drive C.

Notice in the top panel that the partition on drive C shows a capacity of 3.92GB, with 2.29GB of free space. If it was necessary, the partition on C could be resized smaller without losing any data because 2.29GB contain no data.

NOTE

When Linux is installed, it's usually installed into more than one partition, facilitating some Linux security features and techniques. The installation procedure for most distributions creates the Linux partitions in the unallocated space during installation.