linuxmint - partition problem on installation

I've been installing bea on a USB drive connected to my laptop, which seems to cause several problems with the partitioning program during installation.

That disk had an old installation of ubuntu on it; the partitioner offered the option of reducing the size of this, which seemed a good idea. However, this size reduction kept failing, possibly because the livecd system repeatedly kept mounting the partition on /media/usbdisk (iirc).

So I gave up on the resizing job, and decided to partition the disk by hand into two chunks plus some swap. Similar problem - the livecd system seemed to keep mounting the existing partition. I ended up using dd to kill all the partition tables after a manual umount.

Which led to the next problem. Every time I used the manual partition program, I was asked not only about the target USB drive (sda), but /also/ it wanted mount points for the internal hard drive hda - the one with XP and other useful stuff on it, which I wanted left totally untouched, at least for now (which is why I'm using the USB drive in the first place). There seemed no way to tell it to leave hda strictly alone.

I ended up in desperation just using the "use all the disk" option - which skipped any questions about hda, and indeed left it well alone. But it's left the USB disk partitions in a non-ideal state!

I'm pretty new to the linux scene (currently a FreeBSD user :-| ) and the experience has not been helpful. Can anyone shed light please?

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Mike Scott Harlow Essex England.(unet -a-t- scottsonline.org.uk)
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