I have a HDD of 200 GB with 3 partitions. THe 1st one is of 20 gigs, and the other two are 80.All of them are NTFS.

If i cut from the 3rd partition 20 gigs using Partition Magic, will i be able to install Linux without loosing any data from the third partition ? i want to install suse 10.1;

can someone pls halp me ?

Modifying partitions and installing an operating system allways carrys some risk of data loss. You must have backups of your important files on seperate media.
Of course if you don't have a backup you will still loose data sooner or later when your harddrive fails or get corrupted. Everyone learns the hard way.

This should work but there are several points where there is a chance of things going wrong.

A crash or power loss when modifying the partitons is very likely to corrupt your data.

Linux dosn't use drive letters so it's easy to be confused about which partition is which if you arn't familiar with how linux does it. Choose the
wrong partition to install on and you have a problem.

I'm not familiar with how SuSe 10.1 does it but it probably eaither offers
to install a bootloader automatically or lets you select from some options yourself. If this step dosn't happen in the right way you can end up being
unable to boot windows. In this case it is possible to fix it with the right
boot CDROM and arcane commands or put the drive in another computer
and copy the files off.

__________________
"I went over to a friend's house the other day. He was having problems with his computer and he asked me to look at it, and I realized he had Windows Me and it's like, oh no—that's your first problem."-Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell.

thanks for the info

Also, convert the partition you'll be using for the linux install from an NTFS filesystem to an EXT3, and create a 4th partition for a swap partition (and yes, swap is a category in partitionmagic, they make it very easy), the size of it should be roughtly double your RAM. This will improve the performance of your machine overall once you get it all up and running.

well he probably doesnt need a swap partition... modern linux distros dont really need them.. and read on bootloaders first so you dont lock yourself out of your system...

In this case he must activate swap in the file. I think if he has less than 1Gb RAM some kind of swap is necessary.

asdfca is right, the last ubuntu ship i get dont needed swap...

wich distro are you going to use?

i usually use and install linux distro on the Virtual PC , its great and you can learn and gets everything you like . give it a try , won't lose anything