Just a few questions about support
 

Hi, guys, I'm thinking about putting SuSE 9 on my box, but I'd like to know a few things before I go destroying my XP install.

1. Can I play dvd's from a dvd-rom, and in divx format from my HD?
2. Can I burn cd's?
3. Is mp3 support available?

Thanks!

Why destroy XP?

I mean, just check out SuSE 9's partitioning ability. If it's OK, then just re-part' the drive and dual boot (I understand that with mandrake, this is quite easy). If SuSE 9 isn't so hot at repartitioning, then either get a distro that will do the job (again, mandrake) or some third party partitioning hardware and then re-part' followed by the install.

But SuSE shouldbe OK otherwise.

Your questions.

1. Don't know, you'd have to surf the SuSE site and see what's included in their distro, and the specific app's capability. But yes you should be able to do that.

2. Yes, either using a command line utility or one of the many cd burning utilities that have a graphic front end.

3. Yes.

regards

John

i can repartition, leaving xp intact?

Yes.. but be careful. Here is a few tips from my experiance installing Debian (and aplies to any distro for this matter).

Is your hard disk formated in NTFS or FAT32 ?

If you have FAT32, there is a tool called FIPS wich can repartition your HD and leave XP (or any Win) intact.

IF you have NTFL, then NO. Unless you have a second HD installed

Now... IF you have a second HD installed: Is your WinXP installed in the first HD ('C:') or in the second HD ('D:')?

If you have WinXP installed in 'C:' you can dual boot WinXP and Linux (LILO, the Linux loader will ask you what system to boot)

If you have WinXP installed in 'D:' you are pretty much screwed. You would need to reinstall WinXP in 'C:' , and then install Linux in the second HD.

I believe that this is incorrect. As I understand it, because, mandrake can repartition an NTFS partition. Personally I've only used partition magic (because I have a copy), but you can surf for a freeware/shareware partitioning tool such as Ranish partition manager.

The FAT32/NTFS thing is to do with writing to NTFS partitions. You should be able to read an NTFS partition with most of the "mainstream" distro's, whereas writing to NTFS partitions is a little sketchy. Hence if possible, if you can convert your XP to a FAT32 format, it's more convenient, because Linux distro's have no problems in reading/writing to that.

the linuxiso site has virtually all the current distro's (The SuSE may be a version or two back - that's their policy, they want you to buy the current version, though that's not really that expensive!).

Also, you should be able to run mandrake/RH/fedora/SuSE from a single partition. It's good practice to have a swap partition, but not always necessary (you'd have to check the doc's on whatever you settle on and see what they say).

But the answer is pretty much, that yes you can dual boot winXP or whatever with most, if not all distro's, without too much of a problem. That's why mandrake is excellent, if you "loose your bottle" you just put the first disc back in, when prompted, hit F1 and follow the instructions to re-install the windows bootloader. Plus a few other handy tricks.

If you're gonna go for it, you've come to the right place.

regards

John

p.s. A good place to start is knoppix. You download that, burn it to a CD, and run it from the drive. It can also be installed to your hard drive, but runs entirely from the CD unless you actually tell it to install, and it's damn near impossible to do that by mistake. Surf their forum's for lot's of advice/suggestions. The install to HD, is almost as easy as installing mandrake - the only thing you'd have to look into is modem's - particulaly dial up type modems.

Could you please give us a little clarification on this one?

I do know linux is able to create NTFS partitions, but my doubt here is: Can Mandrake RESIZE a NTFS partition as FIPS does with FAT36 partitions, without losing data?

If so, thats great news !! :)

hey, i tried to resize my NTFS partition that had XP on it, and now when i try to boot into XP, it says that ntdlr is missing, any ideas?

found the problem, boot drive had to be set as "LBA" in bios.

dont need to repart
 

when u install suse 9 on xp it will do the repart for u u dont have to repart it manually unless u are running short on space
i u have a 40 gig hard drive suse will divide the drive into 2*20 gig which works well for me

So JohnnyNapalm,

Have you managed to get "it" installed and running?

If so, maybe you could just finish off the thread with a little "precis" of what you actually did, and any problem's that you encountered, how you cured then etc. because this often helps "newer newbies" when they're looking for idea's and assistance.

regards

John

Ok, start to finish.

I ended up installing Mandrake 10.0, used a boot floppy.
Installed LiLo as the bootloader.
Then, when it would restart, and I would try to load back into window, I kept getting the NTLDR error.
Went into my BIOS, and changed my windows drive to LBA mode. That let me boot back into windows fine.
So now I'm running both XP and Mandrake 10 on the same drive.