Hello LinuxNoob10 and welcome to the openSUSE forum. I am not sure I would have put Noob in your name, as surely this will not be true forever. You did right in asking questions before you did the installation. I am going to make suggestions and you may wish to once again start the installation, but abort before the final go ahead unless it is more clear to you.
When you install openSUSE, there must be room for openSUSE to create at minimum, two partitions (in addition to any existing ones). One will be for something called SWAP, a disk based memory swap area anytime an application needs more real memory than you have installed and the main or root partition, where all or most of the openSUSE files are installed. The default partition types used for these two directories are called SWAP & EXT4. These differ from the standard NTFS partitions that are created by Windows. One more factoid, you can only have four primary partitions per hard disk AND, you can only boot from a Primary partition unless you have loaded the Grub menu Operating System Selector into the MBR or Master Boot Record. It is possible to have more than four partitions, but one of them must be a logical partition, which can contain more than one Logical drive, but which can not be directly booted from (except when grub is loaded into the MBR and loads the rest of itself from a openSUSE logical partition).
OK, after all of that baloney you say, what does that mean to you? Well the number one thing is to consider reducing the size of your D partition (at least 40 GB in size) before you start the openSUSE installation. This give openSUSE some where to load into and while openSUSE will attempt to reduce a partition size, it may be unable to do so, for various reasons. Anytime you decide to reduce a partition size, make a full backup of all data before you start. Don’t forget to locate your original Windows boot disk before you start, just in case. You might want to consider adding in a new hard drive, and moving all data on drive D: to the new hard drive, thus allowing more space for openSUSE to use on the boot disk.
Now I can’t see your Windows setup, but you want to make sure of the total number of partitions present, by running the Windows 7 disk manager, before you start to load openSUSE. For instance, the last Windows 7 PC I looked at had one small restore partition and a Windows 7 partition, even though there was only the C: drive. You don’t want any surprises here due to an unknown partition on the Windows hard drive.
Finally, what would be the perfect Partition setup for a dual boot Windows 7 and openSUSE 11.3 setup? Keep in mind this is just my opinion, but this is what I would do If I could get rid of the D: drive and have only the Windows 7 C: drive and no hidden partition was present.
- Master Boot Record to be Generic booting only, no grub installed in the MBR
- C: Partition (H0,0 or /dev/sda1) for Windows 7 as Primary Partition
- SWAP Partition (H0,1 or /dev/sda2), also a Primary Partition Type
- / openSUSE root (H0,2 or /dev/sda3) or main partition, Primary Type Marked Active - for booting and loaded with Grub Boot Loader.
- /home partition (H0,3 or /dev/sda4), Primary Partition for all personnel files.
Now you can add a second hard drive and place all or part of openSUSE on that second hard drive, but you must be able to boot from the openSUSE partition, where ever it is located. You want to leave the MBR as generic as it makes it easier to return booting control to Windows 7 if you decide you do not want to use openSUSE. I suggest you download and make a bootable openSUSE LiveDISK for KDE which you try out before you decide to install openSUSE. I suggest doing the openSUSE install from the 4.7 GB DVD as it contains a lot more software installation choice up front.
OK, got any more questions? Then Fire away…
Thank You,