Partitioning for a 2nd operating system

I have an external hard drive, Seagate FreeAgent Go 250GB and i would like to partition it and use it as an external hard drive for my windows vista laptop and i would like to install openSUSE 11.1. I need help partitioning my drive. I searched my help option on my windows vista and found that to create a boot partition.. open computer management Click to open Computer Management.

If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

In the Navigation pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.

Right-click an unallocated region on your hard disk, and then click New Simple Volume.

In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click Next.

Type the size of the volume you want to create in megabytes (MB) or accept the maximum default size, and then click Next.

Accept the default drive letter or choose a different drive letter to identify the volume, and then click Next.

In the Format Partition dialog box, do one of the following:

If you don't want to format the volume right now, click Do not format this volume, and then click Next.

To format the volume with the default settings, click Next. For more information on file formats and requirements for earlier operating systems, see Comparing NTFS and FAT file systems.

Review your choices, and then click Finish.

There is no unallocated region showing. How do I partition the drive or can I with out having to reformat the whole drive.

I attached a pic. of the computer management screen.

It looks like you got yourself a task…

First things first… BACK UP YOUR DATA… I do not offer warranties on my suggestions… always test before you attempt on any production equipment…

OK now for the technical part of it…

I could easily plagiarize this great article and post it here but I would rather not do that. And to save time and resources I will do what the Internet was born to do… Link…

Dual Boot Vista and Ubuntu (Vista installed first)

Yeah I know the guide has Ubuntu and you want SUSE… I am pretty confident that it will work for you no matter what distro you use… I have tested these instructions and can verify that they work… Tested on my Dell Latitude D830 work laptop…

So, if I understand you right, you want to install Suse Linux on the external drive and be able to boot from it? While leaving Vista on the internal hard drive?

Whats currently on the external hard drive?

You have to right-click the partition and "shrink" it to create "unallocated" space.

Back up your data first, this stuff can destroy data.

You're going to have to make the boot partition active on the external drive and direct your BIOS to boot from that drive when you want it to. I have no idea exactly how something like that would work.

Thanks for your comments I figured it out. I reformatted the drive and instead of going with OpenSUSE I went with Ubuntu and it walked me through it. Thanks