Oi! This sucks. I tried a while back to install Mandrake 9.1 and i installed it, No problems. However, when I went to boot back into windows I couldn't. o.O Windows would get to the little bar moving and then restart. And im using XP Pro. If anyone knows what I should do, please tell me. Should I use the first or second HD? I have 768 ram, a 1.6 gig processer. and two 80 gig HDDs. Also a CDRW and a DVD-Rom . o.O and a soundblaster card and an nvidia geforce mx 420. o.O If anyone can tell me what to do, Id appreiacte it.

well... so does xp just act like it is starting up or does it even do that? how much space do you have for each. and have you tried looking it up on the inertnet?

Personally, I'd put XP on your "first" drive and install it first and Mandrake on your "second" drive and install it second - however - can you currently boot into Mandrake ? - if so, get to a shell then su to root user then type:

cat /etc/lilo.conf

and post the results.

Well, its no longer on my HD. It was on my first one with xp... thats probabbly the problem. Anyway, Umm It would go ot hte boot screen and ask what I wanted to load (win, linux, ect.) and whenever I chose windows it would act like it was loading adn then just restart. o.O

it's really completely up to you... you could go the way of using one disk for windows and one disk for linux, but for the operating system you'll be using the least it would be a waste of space, perhaps.

just to give you an idea, if i personally had two 80gb disks and had to install windows for some reason, i'd give the first 20gb or less on the first disk to windows, the remaining 60gb for the linux root, swap, and home, and i'd use the second disk completely for storage (linux)... i'd use the reiser file sytem for linux and fat32 for windows because fat32 is at the present time more reliable to work with from linux than ntfs... and also i'd keep a tarball of my windows partition in my linux so that when a virus or an a-hole shreds my windows box i can have it up again like new in a few seconds.

of course you could assign windows more space than linux if you just want to tinker with linux on the side and plan to do all your main stuff on windows... either way, the choice is yours. and you have MANY CHOICES.

ah, open source.

=)