I wanted to know if i delete all my partitions using gparted and then create the partions i want, will i be able to reinstall windows vista and Suse without any problems or should i do something else first. I dont need any of the data on any of the partitons. The reason I want to start fresh is that my laptop was shipped with alot of partitions i dont want and vista gripes as far as resizing unless i turn off snapshots and pagefiles, so i just want to limit the entire vista partition to 20Gb, and format the other partitons in ext3 for linux distributions. One more question, can different linux distributions share the same \home partition. thx
Some laptops ship with a utility partition that (sometimes) contains the restore/rescue images for rewriting the vista installation back to a wrecked vista partition. You might want to preserve that. Otherwise your Gparted proposition sounds OK.
Sharing /home: there are limits – I wouldn’t be sharing the same /home between e.g. Gnome on Ubuntu and KDE on Fedora and KDE4 on Suse – no way (Ubu has no root username, Fed has Security Enhancements tricky, KDE4.0 on Suse is a bust). But I would share the same /home between two issues of the same distro, like I successfully used the same /home for 10.2, 10.3 and 11. Then after a while in 11 I found I needed a new /home and had to take the data off, format the old /home and remake it again.