no - diskdrake will format needed partitions as are needed.[/quote]WHat OS to install first Windows 2000 or Linux.[quote]Win2k first, then linux. On account that windows does not play well with the other children.You are doing fine - install windows then, if you can, boot from the linux install CD. Suggest, however, that you do not install mandrake. Since you are going to all this trouble, best to get an up to date distro - the latest mandrivia for eg. There is usually a problem starting the installation from an external USB drive in that few linux installers have the usb drivers loaded by deafult. There are many howtos online about how to handle this. For mandrake, I think, this involves editing in a new boot image for the CD, but you can also put a simple boot manager in after you have installed windows, which has the correct drivers.

Probably your best bet is to replace that internal DVD drive anyway. They are removable in most laptops.

I think that is the best bet.Can you please tell me the name of some boot managers that can give Linux drivers to boot from external DVD.Also I imagine that somewhere in Linux is the path coded where to search for DVD drive. If that is hard coded then e.g. it always searches for DVD in Drive D , then what do I have to do to ask it to read from R or E for example.
I can replace DVD drive. Its is working functionally but it has gone dead since the Firmwire is written bad. My averatec is all closed and I have tried best to open with no luck.

I can replace DVD drive. Its is working functionally but it has gone dead since the Firmwire is written bad. My averatec is all closed and I have tried best to open with no luck.

If you remove your faulty drive installation from external USB shouldn't be a problem for any Linux distro, especially Mandriva. I have internal CD and external USB-DVD, and I installed SuSE from DVD without any problem.

have a nice day
bye

As long as the lappy bios allows usb booting or you have something like floppy smartbtmgr to get usb drive going for install,things should work out. Your linux installer may also have boot option/parameter to use usb too so drive is recognized. Try to restore that bios/firmware too.

lestoil: that is the problem - see early posts. While the bios allows usb booting, the installer dosn't. Admittedly, using a distro which does allow this is probably the least painful solution.

If you have a floppy drive, You can make a floppy with hdcdrom_usb.img. The install cd or dvd has images/ directory.
Under Windows you can make the boot floppy wih rawwrite program that is in cd dosutils/ directory.(If you have dos the program is rawrite)
Start RawWrite>Select boot image(/images hdcdrom_usb.img) to be copied and the target device,A:drive(floppy)>insert blank floppy in drive and click on write button then finally when done click on exit and test boot floppy. To be safe make another copy.
Hope it works or you.
Debian Sarge,Fedora,Mandriva,Suse,Slackware all boot from usb-cds.
Wish there was an install boot parameter to tell installer to use usb drive.Cheers.

Slackware allow you to select a premounted dir as install source, I do not know whether other distros have this option. If yes, you can easily mount the usb cdrom to a temp dir and start installation from that.