Some time ago I installed Debian unstable with a 2.6 kernel on a dual boot machine. I vaguely recall at the time that I had to give the install special parameters related to the disk geometry so that the install would not trash windows. Is this still necessary? I want to install Mandriva on a dual boot laptop, but I do not want to trash the windows partition. Any insight would be appreciated.

TIA

well during the installation of mandriva, the partitioner gives you options of resizing your windows paritions and things (if you choose to resize, make sure you thoroughly defrag and scan disk before hand) and will set up the bootloader to duel boot without screwing up your windows install.

I think the issue in question is "Does the Linux use a geometry different to that already adopted by Windows?" This is to say Windows may have stuck with xyz No. of cylinder/head/sector but a Linux installer may decide the same hard disk should read as ijk No. of cylinder/head/sector.

Th answer I think is "possible" and this is more to do with mixing the old hard disk with new hard disk. The problem seems to have been particularly widespread in early Fedora.

My advise is to try it out, preferably with an installable Live CD. If you can read from Linux the Windows partition information correctly then its installer would not change it during installation.