Great news, i am ready to erase my Windoz.

I was using a dual boot, 70 Go for this $ os and 10 Go for Mdk 9.1
But i don't know really know how to re-format the 70 Gb partition and "give" it to the linux os.

Is there a tool included in Mandrake 9.1 for this ?
Is it possible to change the menu in Lilo boot to erase Windoz ?

Thanks in advance.

to change lilo just edit /etc/lio.conf and re-run "lilo" as root

to format the drive, firstly change it officially to a linux partition (type 83) in fdisk or cfdisk and then format it with "mke2fs -j /dev/hda1" to create an ext3 partition. assuming that's what the partition is acutally called. then just edit /etc/fstab to mount the sucker.

it would be a good idea to split the system up into smaller partitions to make it more secure, but this may well disrupt your system as it is likely to renumber your partitions, so i wouldn't actually advise this until you feel comforatble doing it. certianly something to remember though.

Thanks for this quick answer !
What would you recommend for the "smaller partitions size" ?
Is 20 Gb enough ?

An other quick question : I'm currently using Mdk 9.1 distro, and i've heard it is possible to use another distro.
Which one is more affordable for newbies ? ( Suse, Debian ... ? )

well generally we'd go for:

/boot 50mb
/ 2gb
/usr 8gb
/home 70gb

something like that. but that would presumably require a major restructuring of your system, which is undesirable i'd assume.

affordable? you mean easy? have a look at the reviews section of this site for opinions on other distros. you can certainly insatll more than one distro on a single drive.

Why pay for something that is free?

redhat.com

Support, not only support as in tech support, but support as in you believe they offer a quality product and would like to give them monetary supplement for their work.

A Box with manuals and some commercial software (sometimes).

Special access to certain features that only customers who purchase a specific version of that product get access to.

Cool

You can also boot from the Mandrake CD #1 and when asked,tell the installer to use the entire drive.
Mandrake will partition the drive like this:
(Using a 20GB drive as an example)
/ or root partition=6GB
swap=512MB
/home=13.5GB
This is the default.You can set it up like acid-kewpie suggested,with a /boot and a /usr partition,of course,if you use expert mode.
HTH
lynch