Hey Gurus I'm having some issues sorting my mother's laptop out (finally). Trying to install Linux Mint 14.0 and it doesn't want to recognise the HDD in the installer as it would normally. It appears fine in the partioner. Windows 7 went on fine with no issues whatsoever. Could there be some kind of hardware block to stop a non-Windows OS going on there or is it something else? How are I fix this? Thanks in advance. BLEH!
Are you trying to put them both on the same partition? If you are I don't really think that'll work, or at least, problem heaven (linux doesn't like NTFS and Mint might not even support it). Shrink the partition in windows 7 best you can (or however much you need), then format the free space to ext4 in the Mint installer. If not, dunno.
As above poster said,shrink the windows partition,let it unallocated. Run the Mint installer,choose something else when ask you about partitioning,manually create partitions. Choose like 20 gb for / root,3-4 gb for swap and the rest for /home.(if you have mbr partitioning table) It is possible that it has EFI/UEFI and you may create a bios-grub small partition (if the you have gpt partitioning table).