Hello, I am going to try out Mandriva on a 45 gig partition I set up after I installed XP. I definitely do not want to delete XP and instead put Mandriva in its place, so I would like to set up a dual boot. On my primary partition, there is XP. I have Linux One on a DVD, and so now I am wondering how to set up a dual boot so I can choose between the two. If you need my motherboard spec, which I doubt, request so. I have heard of things like a disc director, but I do not feel like downloading nor paying $50. Can someone suggest a free dual boot system? I have heard of this YaST thing, but I honestly do not understand it, and I am not sure if I can download it. Thank you.

Use something like the gparted liveCD or the SystemRescue CD to repartition your hard drive and then install Linux. Some distros will automatically setup lilo or grub for you so your computer will dual boot.

You will need a swap partition and of course, a linux partition. A general rule of thumb is that you need 1.5-2X your RAM for swap, but it you have a lot of RAM (1GB+) then you can make do with a lot less depending on what you will be running. Give yourself at least 15GB (more if you can) for a Linux Desktop unless you plan on being very frugal with your software or don't mind your partition being somewhat full.

I only have 1GB of RAM running right now...so the partition I have have set up will not work with Linux because it is not a SWAP partition?

Hi -

Most distros will detect Windows, resize the Windows partition (allowing you to decide exactly how much/how little to allocate to Linux) and install dual-boot all "automatically", with zero effort on your part.

I'm not familiar with Mandriva ...
... but if it doesn't automatically handle dual-boot (with little or no manual intervention on your part), then you might want to consider another distro.

Simply Mepis (http://www.mepis.org) and SuSE Linux (http://en.opensuse.org/) are two I've personally used (for many different versions) and vouch for. There are many others to choose from.

'Hope that helps .. PSM

PS:
1GB RAM is more than enough for any distro, 10-20GB disk should be more than enough for all of Linux - including the OS, the swap partition, and all of your Linux files. And I wouldn't worry too much about the size of your swap (whatever install recommends should be fine) ... because with 1GB, you might never even *touch* your swap space.

Oh, so I was just making it harder on myself...I didn't know Mandrake came with the feature of dual-boot on startup...Thank you.

Note: Do it with your friend which familiar with linux

First,you need to defrag your harddisk by defragment tools from your windows (start--programs--accesories--systems tools).
Then, restart your computer and boot it from cdrom (BIOS). Insert your linux cd.
Then it willbe booting automatically. You just need to wait!
When it succeed entering linux, try to find "install" icon on desktop. (Except knoppix v5, you need to go terminal and typed "knoppix--installer")
After this, you just answer simple questions. All you need to worry is linux partition. Just prepare 7 gb empty or unused freespace and separate it from win partition. Linux need ext3 and swap. Swap need double size from your RAM size(if you use 256 mb, so you need 512 mb). The rest is used for linux ext3.
Next, wait the process
Finally, if the installation completed, you can use your linux
Just try that. Hope and pray