Hi,

I have just recieved my copy of Mandrake 10 Official, and want to install it on my friends windows machine (because he no longer wants pop-ups virii etc) and it is a good dist to play games.

the machine is a compaq thing (3ghz P4 512meg ram and 1 80gig hdd)

When i start the install and get to partitioning, will i have to loose his partitions (D: , E: )?

reason being he has all his songs, game files etc etc

as i said he only has 1 hdd so im worried it will blank the partition table when i make a linux native and swap.

Is there anyway i can still keep the windows partitions (excluding C: )?

Any help would be great

Mandrake will not erase any partition except if you ask to.

You will have a new Linux partition created .

What Windows is he using? If 2000 or XP, are the partitions formatted as NTFS or FAT32?

I'm going to assume NTFS....

In theory, Mandrake 10 is supposed to be able to resize NTFS partitions without harming them. Normally I would believe Mandrake, but I have heard rather too many stories of people having difficulties with the 10.0 install that I would trust the installer to do this on a friend's machine.

Rather, I would first defrag the drives in question, then resize them myself, using a partition utility such as Partition Magic (if you happen to own this already), or a free utility such as Ranish Partition Manager. Leave the space recovered from the NTFS partitions as free unpartitioned space, then run the Mandrake install and tell it to use that space for creating the partitions (or create them yourself from the unpartitioned space, if you feel comfortable with that).

Hope this helps.

The easiest way I've found to get both running on one machine is stick another drive in and partition that for linux. No muss No fuss.
Doesnt mess with your windows partition.
Take it from me, I've blown up both windows and linux in more ways than I care to mention, and this is the best way I've found to keep ita ll straight, and if one disk gets smoked, you still have at least one operating system to fall back on.

and definately never accidently try to place the boot loader on a NTFS formatted partition :P ooopps!

i got it to install around the windows partition i wanted

I installed mandrake 10 official (i just purchased it) and it always bloody freezes!
expecially when you copy something over the network...

wierd. I have mandrake 10 community on my machine and it works a dream so im going to try that, otherwise i will have to find a dist with 2.6 and plays all the games that i have been playing on my machine

I had the same Problem with my Community vers.
Mandrake use some Data, Commands,.. which windows isn't able to understand.
i tried fdisk /mbr, but it didn't work
using a freedos version helped, but data is lost...

i had to force LBA mode for the HDD in the BIOS, format and reinstall everything.
now it works

In the end i deleted the windows partition and made the whole drive ext3

after plenty of headaches before i worked out the noapic and nolapic commands... everything works a treat