Duel Booting
 

I have a Windows ME computer. I am thinking about installing Mandrake 8.1 on it. I have 2 questions:

1) Is it ok to have the ME installed and then install the Mandrake (for duel booting purposes)?

2) I have 1 Hard Drive (with one partition) and don't want to touch it much (other than lop off some of the Gigs to use with Mandrake). Am I correct in assumeing DiskDrake will modify the partition to create 2 more partitions (without reformating) to use with Linux? If so, how often is this successful (with no loss of information)? Last part of this question is if it works, how much should I put to the swap and how much other (I have 512MB or ram)?

1. yeah, you can leave ME on there...

2. i am not too familiar with mandrake, haven't used since 7.0 but it does come with a tool to shrink your existing partition to repartition for mandrake use. don't know how good it is or successful it is, just backup before installing and make sure you defrag your drive too..
with 512 megs or ram, 100 megs should do fine.. i usually make my swap no more than 100 megs which is never hardly used.

Duel booting... does this mean they have to fight to take control of the PC? :-)

If you defrag in windows, watch the options. One option just spreads out your files to make access quicker. You want the option that squashes them all up at one end.

Joe

Jedi_Cheese, I use a duel boot system with WindowsMe and Mandrake. The way I set up the partitions was with a program called PartitionMagic which was an excellent choice because I wanted to make sure I complete controll over my Disk. A program which comes with PartitionMagic is called BootMagic. I have it set for Windows to remain my default boot choice. Check out PM at :
http://www.powerquest.com/products/desktop.html

You won't be sorry!