Hello,
I am considering buying a barbone system from an online vendor and wanted to know if my choice of motherboard will affect whether I can dual boot Mandrake Linux 9.1 and Windows 98SE?

The Motherboard that I've chosen is 'ECS K75SA', a relatively cheap board that gets decent reviews for its $60 price!

Since I use Mandrake primarily as my main OS but use Win98SE for PC gaming, I still need the choice to dual boot using Lilo.

I've searched the Net and this board to see if there are only certain motherboards that all you to dual boot but got nowhere.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!!

Thanks

Checkers

Hi

As far as I know, dual boot is hardware-independent. You need to have a boot loader [in your master boot record (MBR)], a program that allows the user to choose which OS to boot into.

If you're using Linux as one of the dual boot operating systems, LILO or GRUB are the boot loaders you are most likely to use, say if you're using RedHat Linux.

Vivek

Thanks Vivek,
Yes, I am currently using Lilo to dual boot my current PC. Its just that i am getting a 2nd (cheaper) system and since I was buying a cheaper MoBo, I wasn't sure if i'd run into harware problems with dual booting Windows and Linux.

I may spend an extra $20 and purchase an ASUS A7V8X-X motherboard as the Asus Website refers to BIOS upgrades for Windows and Linux.

Checkers

Some Asus motherboards require that you disable something in the BIOS, or the SMP kernel will crash and you won't get past lilo. I can't remember the acronym but it's "Enable xxxx 1.4" (I think it's MT something, I don't think it's MTRR). After this is disabled it should work. I read a post somewhere by Alan Cox saying there should be no performance hit, it's basically a tighter specification than the previous version.

Of course, if you can boot the SMP kernel anyway, then ignore this.

HTH

B.

-- ha ha I must be tired. Dual BOOT not dual CPU. I gotta read these things more carefully. I'll... just... be hitting the old... dusty trail now... (trips and hits face)

Go for the ASUS board. The K7S5A has a chequered history of hardware-related problems. For more info, search google on 'K7S5A problems' and you'll see what I mean (be prepared for a lot of reading though).