Hello,

I am getting a little confused here. Here is what I am trying to do:

I have two hard drives, one currently has Windows XP Home, the second will have Mandrake 8.1. First of all, does the default install of Mandrake automatically configure dual booting so that I can boot both OS's? And second, if it doesn't do that, how can I make it so that the XP boot loader loads, and has choices for both XP and Linux? Does the last installation step of Mandrake ask to configure the boot loader, so that I can specify first sector of second hard drive instead of MBR?

If anyone understands what I just said that'd be great!!
Thanks.

was it you i was telling to put windows on the slave channel? well do that, and put lilo in the linux drive MBR, lilo will automatically set up for a dual boot cost it's clever. i've not done it, but i'd presume that if you tell lilo to instal into a partition and not the MBR then it should automatically go into the partition on linux that contains the boot image. it's not hard to configure by hand afterwards tho if it's not perfect.

Hi,
I'm not sure what will Mandrake installer do if you choose "recommended" mode, but you can safely choose "expert" (which isn't hard, really!). After unstalling all packages it will ask you where to install LILO. So you should choose hda. MDK will automatically detect Windows and add it to it's menu.

Mara

That seems to be a popular way of doing it Acid_cupie I got the same advice from someone else and it works like a charm.. I dont think xp likes being a slave to anything though.. lol
Just a warning about installing man 8.1 and getting everything working... It aint all peaches and cream regardless of what anyone says..Pretty confusing to someone with ZERO linux experience.