Another Mandrake 9.2 question

[Alakazam]

Hmmm, where to start, LOL. I picked up another HDD today to be able to mess around with Linux and another OS. My current set-up consists of a single HDD dual booting Win98 and Win XP on IDE 1 as master, nothing is on channel 2. IDE 2 has a CD-R and a CD-RW on it.

After I install the new drive, do I want to do anything to it or just go ahead and let Mandrake do it's thing on the drive and partition it later for the other OS (Longhorn), or does Longhorn need to be on the drive first? The drive is a 40 gig so there will be plenty of room for whatever I decide to do.

I'm not even sure that I can have 4 OS running, will the boot loader on C drive, which is where 98 is installed, be able to do that or what the heck am I geting into here, LOL.

[Grogan]

Always put any Windows partitions you're going to have first on a drive, before Linux partitions.

Don't partition at all for Linux, leave the rest of the disk unallocated. You'll create Linux partitions during the installation. (use diskdrake)

So install Longhorn first, to the first partition on the drive.

Install Linux... and when you install the boot loader, it will indeed go to the first hard disk. What you'll get is, Linux boot choices and your DOS/Windows boot choice will be your NTLDR menu, where you can choose your Windows OSes.

[Alakazam]

Thanks G, I think I'll just split it in half then, 20 gig for Windows and the rest unallocated. It will probably be later in the week before I get around to trying this.

[Grogan]

That sounds good, Zammy.

During the installation, you'll want to choose the Custom Partitioning option, to get to the diskdrake utility. From there, if unsure what you want to do with partition sizes, you can click on the unpartitioned space, then click the autoallocate button and it will automatically create Linux filesystems for you. Choosing the sizes and mount points yourself, you can choose to mount various parts of the linux filesystem on separate partitions, but all you REALLY need is a root partition and a swap partition.

When you get to installing the boot loader, install it to /dev/hda (your first IDE hard disk... the master boot record).

Good luck with it, when you get to it :-)