Hello I have a question concerning my hard drives. I have two 80GB Hard drives, one contains windows and the other linux. Right now they are both set as master so if I want to use one I have to open my case and switch up the IDE cable to get it to boot from either one. The questions is can I set one as master and one as slave and have the bootmanger display the two OS's and let me have the choice to what one I want to boot into? thanks again.

Yes.

;-) j/k

Anyhow, install your bootmanager (LILO or GRUB) onto the drive containing Linux. When you setup the bootmanager through the installation (simplest way to install the bootmanager is to reinstall your distro, btw) you should have the option to define an entry for your FAT partition as well. Oh yeah, and then have your Linux drive set to Master of course.

I really don't want to format is there a way that I ca n do that without having to do so?

"format"? Why would you have to format anything? The only thing you'd be formating is your MBR. If you mean you don't want to reinstall Mandrake, then you can setup your bootmanager manually, although it takes some know-how. Basically what you need to do is edit your bootmanager's config file (with LILO it's /etc/lilo.conf) to add an entry for your Win partition (might have thrown you off with FAT; this will work with NTFS too). With LILO you need to run "lilo" after that, but I'm not sure what you'd do for GRUB. Anyhow, changing your bootloader configuration is pretty well documented. Just google for something like this --> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&i...=Google+Search