It is an AMD Athlon 2000+ 1)40g HD 2)20g HD...I created partitions on both drives, windows is on hda0 of course. When I attempt to install DSL on its own partition, everything goes fine, asks if i want grub or lilo etc... On reboot, no boot manager so I installed OSL2000. When I manually try to boot partition, it says operating system does not exist. So, i downloaded ext2FM driver for windows, I can look at the partition and see what appears to be all of the files required but still no boot. I am looking to compensate for windows outrageous hunger for RAM with a lightweight KDE or Gnome. The catch, however, is that I don't want to have to use live every time. If DSL is messed up, can anyone recommend a KDE or Gnome for an Athlon 2000+ with 128mb of DDR...I just want a clean install with functionality. Looking to eventually replace windows. Laptop has vista Ultimate, but my desktop is from 2004...yikes. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Also, can someone tell me why when i tried to use equinox, it told me to download two seperate gz files and compile myself? i don't get it, how is that an os?

DSL grub install script doesn't work correctly if DSL is installed to the second harddrive and not the first harddrive. Grub can be install manually. You can find tutorials on how to do this by googling. There are serveral other light weight distros that will run on your hardware that are better supported then DSL, such as puppy linux, crunchbang, vector light, debian with lxd desktop, and serveral others. My personal preference is Puppy linux which is user friendly, but it depends on what you use your computer for.