Hmm... okay. Thanks for the help everyone. I don't have any more blanks but I'll try to give the LiveCD a go first. I'm a little suspicious as to why the Breezy installer did not offer to resize the ntfs partition for me. If I can resize the partition in the advacned partitioner (and that's an if) then why would the guided partitioner not offer to do it for me? I am also a bit suspicious about these small utility partitions and ghost images. I came across a machine once (don't remember if it was a Dell) that had some sort of low-level disk monitor running below the OS level that monitored for changes in the partitioning scheme each time before booting Windows... I installed Fedora dual-boot, but when I tried to boot into Windows it 'detected a change in my partitions' and refused to boot unless I allowed it to 'restore the machine to factory settings.' I eventually allowed it to do this, and it turned out the WinXP install was restored (with user files) but GRUB was destroyed and the Linux partitions were all corrupted (I tried reading them with Knoppix) destroying users files. That was for a research group in Ottawa, their office machine is still running Windows XP to this day because of that booby trap. We resolved that the only way to dual-boot it would be to install a second hard drive. But from ulist's experience with this same Dell system, it sounds like it does not contain an active disk monitor of this sort and should be safe. <div>On 12/21/05, 'Forum Post <<a href="mailto:ulist@gs1.ubuntuforums.org">ulist@gs1.ubuntuforums.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> When I installed Hoary I had to change a couple of the settings in the BIOS to get it to install...under disk controllers, change the setting to the last option on the right (PATA). I also had to set USB control to "OFF", in other words, to let the OS have control of the USB. This is w/ the latest BIOS from Dell...AO7. If you haven't updated to this version, you should. With Breezy, I changed my disk controllers back to Auto/confi/SATA (the same as w/ XP) and Breezy installed fine and has worked w/out a hitch. So, bottom line is you should be able to install Breezy w/o a glitch (try Live CD 1st to be sure) but keep in mind once the MBR gets overwritten you lose the ability to do the "Dell PC Restore" (Symantec image). -- Emerzen -- ubuntu-users mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com </a> <a href="http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users">http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users</a> </blockquote></div> -- Sean's mailing list bin