You guys say this, and I've gone through the picture tutorials to show where the option should pop up, but that option is not there for me, for some reason. All I can do is either use the whole disc in a guided way or manually use the whole disc.

Well I created a partition and then gave it 40GB, installed Fedora and it was fine. But after seeing my mates Kubuntu, I prefered the KDE distro and the wireless capabilities of it far out paced Fedora which was to be honest utterly shit with wireless connections. So I got rid of Fedora and then installed Kubuntu which I thought was fine apart from the fact that it would not play sound for some reason (probably lacking drivers). I didn't use it because of that reason and thought there was no point in having it on my HDD so I decided to get rid of it and then merge the partitions together. After I did this Windows decided to have a spasm, probably some sort of punishment for even daring to stray, and after 4 Blue Screens it finally got to the stage were it would not boot. Went to get it repaired and the shops awful customer service ended up with me going back and forth for two weeks until they finally took it off me and had it for around four weeks before finally giving it back to me. All they had done by the looks of things was spent £130 on new RAM and put a shit load of sticky documents on the lid >.< To be honest I would get Linux again if the sound worked because I use it at Uni and the bash command is far superioir to that of command line from Windows!

@ SuperDave: Yes I think it was Bill Gates that caused it after discovering I had strayed away from his baby!

Right. You'll have to do it manually, but you still don't have to reinstall. Boot up the LiveCD, go to System -> Adminstration -> Partition Manager or something like that, and it'll bring up GParted.

Select the Windows partition and shrink it (should be fairly obvious; if you see something not right then don't do it) to a size that will leave it with a few GB left over. Then create two new partitions filling the blank space, one about 4GB and one filling the rest of the space. Select "apply" and it will make the changes.

Then when you use the installer, select manual. Select the large partition as "/" and the small partition as "swap". Make sure it's only going to change those two partitions and not ouch your Windows one.

...I will try this out this afternoon, thank you.

Aw nutbunnies. I tried to resize, and am unable to do so using the partition editor. So I look up the information on my disk because there's bound to be some clue in here, and I get this:

I sureh ope this is something I can just fix with canned air...

That's why the option to resize didn't appear... Better you found that out before the drive died! Back up all of your data.

Crap.

What are my options for a replacement drive in a Dell laptop?