Alright, I am a newbie.

I have used some other distros in the past before like SuSE and ManDrake 8.0. Except I had a different setup. It was basically a click, click, click and poof, its on a single drive with no windows.

Now, I have 2 drives, Both 40 gigs. On Drive E (My main drive) I have Windows. On Drive C (my slave) it is also a 40 gigs with nothing on it.

Now I have all ManDrake 9.2 cds. I will want a Duel Boot with GRUB if possible.

I just need to know what I will need to do when installing. I threw in the disks and looked at the install screen and it looked sorta... greek I see HDA and all that and I dont know what to choose or what to do. Any help would be greatful.

I really dont want to loose all me work on this Windows drive.

My system specs are:

2 WD drives (40 gig)
512mb ram
Geforce 4 mx420
Standard CD Drive/Floppy
2 ghz proccessor (AMD)

Thanks.

welcome!!!

=)



/dev/hda = primary master

/dev/hdb = primary slave

/dev/hdc = secondary master

/dev/hdd = secondary slave



example:

/dev/hda1 is the _first_ partition of the primary master disk...

/dev/hdc2 is the _second_ partition of the secondary master disk...



so if you'd wanna install linux onto your primary slave, you'd install it onto /dev/hdb...

you'd make a few partitons in /devhdb...

for example:


/dev/hdb1 = /

/dev/hdb5 = swap

/dev/hdb6 = /home


but i think you can choose the option to have everything auto-partitioned if you don't wanna deal with that stuff (although it's good to understand the concepts and stuff)...

the mandrake installer should see your windows and add the option to boot it when you install it...

Thanks man.

So if it asks me which drive I want to install too (I want it installed to drive c) I would choose /dev/hdb ?

Swap thing? I saw that... do I have to touch it?

Partition.... do I need to make a partiion on Drive C for the boot loader? You said it will do it automatically?

When it asks about disk allocation I go to custom. In there you will see a graphical reprsentation of the partitions on your hard drives. Above it should be a tab that will let you switch between different physical hard drives. For me the first one was my window one (master).

To install Mandrake 9.2 on the second hard drive I when to the second tab and deleted all partitions on it. Then I clicked auto allocate. Done.

I don't remember it saying anything about creating a partitoin for the boot loader. It just asked me where I wanted it. Usually I install Lilo to the MBR (master boot record I believe). I'm pretty sure there is a option to pick Grub instead too.

if what you refer to as "drive c" is the primary slave then yes, it would be /dev/hdb...

but if it's the primary master, it would be /dev/hda...

usually when the pc boots-up, right after the memory check it'll let you know what disk is where and stuff...

on my pc i have a 40gb disk... i use 3gb for root (/), 1gb for swap, and the rest for home (/home)...

the swap partition is important, don't overlook it... it's better to have more swap than you need than to not have enough...

you don't need to make a partition for the bootloader unless you want to... installing it unto the MBR (master boot record) is the usual method...

also, i'd suggest using the reiser filesystem for your system's partitions... reiser rocks!!!