Originally posted by Doomgaze
So the auto-partition on Red Hat will not to, say, write over Windows? I'm not really up on the linux filesystem, so I don't know what I need for swap files and where operating system files go and whatnot.

And I only have Red Hat 8.0. 56k modem makes it kind of hard to keep up with this things, you know? If that's a REAL problem, I think I could download the newer version at school, but that's not for a few weeks.

And let's say I do that later, can I just upgrade, or would it need a fresh install?
I'd assume they haven't radically changed the install tool between 8 and 9, so the partitioning tool should work the same. If I remember correctly, you are first asked between:
- use all the space
- use all the free space
- let me see wtf I'm doing

And after choosing the third, you can let rh auto partition the empty space (I think it creates /swap, /, /home and /boot, I can't remember though) and you'll see what space is used for what, then you can still add whatever you want (like if you want /home/doom on its own partition). then when you're done, you ask to go to the next step and it will ask you to confirm before writing the partition table.

As for updating to RH9, I don't know if it's really worth it since RH is stopping the maintenance on RH7 and 8 on Dec 31st, 2003, and on RH9 by the end of April, 2004. I guess that at that time they will have a fairly good update tool to jump from RH7/8/9 to Fedora Core 1 (2 if it's out then).