Ok. I got a new hard drive (WD 80gig 7200 rpm) and i have one allready in my computer that runs win 98. I want to install mandrake 9.2 on the second one without messing up the first hard drive. How would i do this. All i have done so far is put the hard drive into my computer and that is it. Oh and i made sure that my computer reconized it and it did. It has the right ammount of memory listed and everything. But it does not show up as a drive when i open up "My computer". All i have are the A, C, D, and E... they have all been there before nothing has changed. What should i do. If i did not include enough imformation please tell me.

first decide what you are going to do with the drive. if you are in fact going to install mandrake on it, then pop in the cd and reboot. during the partitioning phase of the install the drive should show up as hdb unformatted or unpartitioned space. use that space to install mandrake. the reason the new drive is not showing up in win, is it isn't formatted. new hard drives come unformatted. you have to stick them in and be certain the bios recognizes them, then use a utility like win fdisk, or linux fdisk | linux cfdisk to format the drive. sorry for the long response, but, there are many implied issues here. is the box in ? your main rig? if so, how much do you stand to lose from a mucked up installation? i'd backup anything that's even remotely important, before, trying the install.
good luck.

Hey #1newb--I'm another newbie, and installing Mandrake 9.2 now. The folks here are very helpful, of course--they've solved lots of problems for me--but if you don't have the manuals, you can download the 9.1 manuals free here:

http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/fdoc.php3

I don't think they're very different from the 9.2 manuals, and they have a good description of the install process. Marcel Gagne's Moving to Linux is good too.

As Peacedog said, back up just in case (though I didn't have any problems related to data loss). As long as you've got the new hard drive properly installed, you should be able to pop in Mandrake Install Disk 1, and during the install process, it should find the hard drive, and if you choose that drive to install it on, it'll format it for you.

Hey... well i figured out what the problem was... and my name is just number one newb because i wanted it to be... but the problem was, was that i had burned the wrong ISO's onto a cd... (this is redhat that i was burning this time) i burned SRPMS instead of i386's it was a dumb accedent that im really embarassed about. I also figured out that mandrake wouldnt boot b/c i had forgot to turn my ATAPI CD boot on, b/c i disabled right before i started doing it. I just plainly forgot to turn it on. This all was just a bunch of hooplah that i cant believe i did. All a bunch of noob mistakes i should have been more careful about. Im so stupid i thought about coming and deleting this post but i was like whatever, screw it. B.c i might stick around help some people ttyl. Right now im working on booting slack and fedora and red hat all on one hard drive. Tought stuff working with the MBR! lol