Install Fedora On Laptop

I realized if I want to work on emscripten at home I had to install a linux partition on my laptop. After starting at 2:00pm I finally finished at 6:00pm. Here is what happened during my 4 hour labor.

I started by buying a re-writable DVD and burning Fedora onto it at the open source lab. This alone took 40 minutes. Next I booted from the CD and couldn't figure out which option to select. After toying around with it, I figured out I had to select to install a new partition from simple video graphics.

This is where the problem comes in. As I'm installing on my laptop, all the memory had been partitioned to main partition. I had no extra memory left over for Fedora. I tried shrinking the memory on the linux boot but it kept throwing an error. After discussing with a few people in the lab, I found out I had to shrink the windows partition once logged onto windows. So I rebooted into Windows and researched how to do it. While doing so my system tried running chkdsk at startup but I disregarded it and skipped it. Researching lead me to an administration tool that allows you to shrink your partition. I tried doing so but it threw an error telling me it couldn't do it and maybe the partition was corrupt. I ran chkdsk as someone suggest and to my dismay, nothing was wrong. So I restarted and let chkdsk run again at boot but nothing was wrong there either.

So after rebooting I tried shrinking the drive again just for kicks and it worked. Success. So now the drive has been shrunk and I have 200 gigs for my Fedora partition. I booted from the DVD again and got back to the correct screen. I click create partition with left over space and ... error. "There is no space to create this partition". I check under custom partition and the space shows up. Why. Why isn't it working.

I go back into windows and search on the web for an hour. Finally I come up with someone having a similar problem. HP computers come with 4 partitions already on them to hold some HP software that comes with the laptop. A hard drive can only hold 4 partitions so you have to delete one. Ok, this makes sense now. I remove one of the pointless partitions using the drive manager and reboot again on the Fedora DVD.

After getting back to the right place, I try again, it works. Finally, I have been able to run the Fedora install. But of course I forgot to do custom and select swap so now every time I start my computer I have to press a button before Fedora boots and select the "Other" Partition. I'll fix that later but for now, I am very happy.