Sup People
I am installing MD 9 on a dell laptop 8100 in expert mode. The install has almost finished. I am at the point where it wants to install a bootloader.

This is a dual boot machine with XP. I used system commander to partation the 40 gig HD as follows.

1st partation Primary 5 gig xp ntfs
2nd partition Primary 3.5 gig ntfs will use to ghost above
3rd partition primary 6 gig Mandrake
4th partition extended 256 mb swap
5th partition not formatted will be extended

My question is that i would like the bootloader to be on the mandrake partition the choices are
/dev/hda
/dev/hda1
/dev/hda2
/dev/hda3
/dev/hda5
/dev/fd0 No Floppy Drive
Could you tell me which is the MD partition.

Also the 5th partition I would like it to be accessable by both MD and XP what type of format should I do on it?

I am very new to this so any help would be appreciated

Peace and Out

The mandrake partition should be /hda3 shouldn't it?

The installation program should show the size of the partition anyway so you should be able to pick out which one is the Mandrake partition...

Oh and fat32 will be read by both XP and Mandrake, so your 5th partition would be fat32 (vfat)

#Garry

The third partition should be hda3 being a primary, the first extended partition would be hda5. You will need a boot floppy, and you will have to make provisions for booting linux from the hd. Either via the bootloader or system commander.

I would make the shared partition fat32, assuming you want to write to it from Linux. I don't think writing to ntfs is recommended, if I'm mistaken you can always convert it to ntfs.

No ntfs isn't successful in writing yet, though reading shouldn't be a problem, just make sure you don't write nothing to it...

#Garry

Thanks all.