Hi
Newby here jumping in at the deep end:
I'm just assembling my brand new PC (for the first time) and intend to dual boot mandrake and XP (new to linux too!)

Can someone point me to a clear step by step tutorial on dual booting XP and Mandrake on a new hard drive that has just been installed?

My drive is 120 GB and I've had all kinds of conflicting advice on how to partition it.

Thanks!

I can't point you to a tutorial, but I can give you some basic advice. It's quite simple to intall XP and Mandrake. First install Windows XP and ideally leave some space on your hard drive for Mandrake Linux. After installing XP run the Mandrake installation and Mandrake can make use of the free space, however if you have not left any space for Mandrake, it can resize your XP partition and install in the free space left after the resize. Mandrake will also install a boot loader, LILO is the default and when you boot your system, you will have the choice to boot into either Windows or Linux. It's not very difficult to do, but I know it can seem a bit daunting if you have not done it before.

No complaints about reddazz' comment.
You should be aware that while Mandrake can read the WinXP's NTFS file system by default, Windows does not have access to the Linux partitions unless you use the ext2fs or YAReG program for that. Therefore, I make extra space on the Windows partition for music files, for instance, files I would like to be able to access from both systems. It is read-only from Mandrake, but that isn't much of a problem for this kind of file. Also, I have a couple of video games I like to keep installed - and that is also a reason to keep a fairly large Windows partition (actually, I have two: System and Storage). As for the Mandrake Linux partitions, you basically need a system partition and a swap. The swap partition follows the standard advice: Twice as much as your RAM. Personally, I use Linux for work, which for me means text documents, HTML files, PDFs and a bit of images. In short: Not something that takes up a lot of space, compared to movie files, games, music.

Defragment your about-to-be-sliced partition.

But...
Do you have both OS'es installed already, or isn't Mandrake installed yet?
If not Mandrake will set you up the boot option nicely.

@ Eyeliner: I concur.
One more thing: Don't partition before the Mandrake Install. Quite a few problems have popped up with that, especially using Partition Manager. It is much better to let Mandrake's DiskDrake (it is run durng Install) take care of that.
If you want to look at the installation process, LinuxBeta recently posted screenshots of the new Mandrake Linux 10.1 Beta. The installation process is mostly the same as 10.0, some of the options on slide 6 are different, but the panel is the same.

Hey great! Here I am banging my head against a wall and meanwhile my questions have been answered!

Now to be sure I understand.

This is what I intend to do.

Divide my drive (which is brand new with nothing on it yet) into three:

One for XP system
One for general storage
One for Mandrake.

Then I would use Mandrake to divide the Mandrake partition into (if I understand this right) a partition for the swap space, and one for system.

I can format the general storage partition as NTFS, as both XP and Mandrake can access it.

But XP wont be able to access the Mandrake system partition.

One last question.

You tell me that my Mandrake swap space should be twice the amount of RAM. I have a Gig of RAM. Isn't 2 Gigs of swap space ridiculously big?

The best in your case is to:

1. Make a partition for XP

2. Make a partition for general usage, FAT file system recommended, as writing in NTFS through Linux is DANGEROUS, i. e. you can (and most certainly will) loose your data!

3. Rest of disk left blank.

4. In Mandrake's installation let him take up the free space by auto allocation.

- Last, I believe that 1 gig of Ram makes unnecessary the usage of a Swap partition.
As Swap is used as a virtual memory module, it makes sense when someone has 128 or so
to make a somewhat big Swap partition (128 max).
Have you ever needed that much memory?
I don't think you will have any problems concerning Ram / Swap space.
For sure, Mandrake will give you a swap partition. If it is too big, make it smaller. (around 128 mb)

OK -

I can't use FAT to format the general storage partition, as it is too big - apparently you can only format partitions up to 32GB with FAT 32 in XP. My partition is around 90GB.

I'm not sure I understand you (speaking to eyeliner here)
Does this mean that I can lose data when saving something with Linux on the NTFS partition?

Yes. NTFS filesystem support is experimental.

This is so because NTFS is property of Microsoft, and they they don't
provide anyone with info about that (go figure), so basicaly, no one is
exactly sure how it works and writing in such devices through Linux is
risky. Beware the NTFS filesystem writing support module's notice.

if you have a 120 gb drive, I would reccomend dividing it up like this: - depending on whether you favor wiondows or linux

1) 50 gig - WindowsXP - NTFS
2) 50 gig - Mandrake Linux - ext3
3) 20 gig - FAT32 - shared between Linux and Windows as both can read/write to it

you can adjust these values any way you'd like to make your SWAP partition, if you need one.

I have a question....

I have an 80GB hardrive that is partitioned as follows:

20GB NTFS windows XP --installed first
60GB for linux

When I install mandrake everything goes well UNTIL I get the the bootloaded.


When I try to install Lilo to the MBR it doesn't work

When I restart Windows boots up normally, so I guess mandrake is having trouble writing to the MBR. I have disable "boot sector virus protection" in my bios...