Hiya everyone, I'm back in the newbie forum since my first stab at Linux didn't go so hot. You were all helpful the first time, so thanks in advance

I'm thinking about installing Mandrake 10.0 on my relatively new Dell Dimension 4600. It has a 120GB Serial ATA HDD, running WinXP. Any other pertinent specs I can think of is a 48X CD-RW/DVD combo drive, but no floppy drive.

Now, I've got an old Western Digital WD307AA 30.7GB 5400rpm HDD (I like to give specifics, bear with me ) that I'd like to install. So upon opening up my computer, I realized a few things:

• The HDD I will be installing - how do I go about installing it? (primary/secondary, master/slave, etc)
• I'm utterly confused on how dual booting works. If someone could explain how to dual boot after I install Mandrake on this newly installed HDD, that'd be great
• Does not having a floppy drive present any problems?
• Also, random question here: I've got a Dell TrueMobile wireless USB adapter. Any leads on how I'd get that to work in Linux?

If you can answer any of the above, thank you very much. If this is posted in the wrong area...which I doubt it is, apologies in advance.

~Jed

The following link will help you out with dual booting linux and XP.

http://www.geocities.com/jtarin47/linux/DualBoot.html

I don't know anything about serial drives, so I can't help you there.

I'm guessing the older 30 gig drive is IDE. If it is the only drive on the bus, it has to be master. If there is another drive on the IDE bus, you can add one more, the second drive becomes slave. Master and slave are set by jumpers on the drive. The first IDE bus is called primary. The second IDE bus present on most boards is called secondary. The primary and secondary IDE busses are more or less independant.

The floppy is not required, unless you need to boot at some point from floppy. You can buy a floppy for about $20. So it is not a big investment. The first time I installed linux, the bios on the old machine I had could not boot from CD. So to install linux, I had to have boot disketts in order to install. If your machine is new, must be with a serial ATA drive, you can install by setting the bios to boot from CD. Linux will install from CD.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the info, I'm still waiting for my Mandrake ISOs to finish downloading, so I'll skim over that info.

Anybody else have a take on things?

well i installed mandrake 10 with a dual boot with windows 2000 on a tiny 8Gb hard drive. What i had to do was do an expert mode so i got all the options and made sure that i did not reformat the drive. now before this i went in to windows and checked how much space windows was taking about 1.8GB. When i got to the partiton hard drive part i resized the windows patition down to about 2.5GB just incase i needed to use it. Then i auto alocated every thing to the space left empty on the drive for linux. After that i don't think i did much else and linux set up the dual boot for me. The only thing i did was tell it i wanted the graphical lilo boot loader.

So case in point
Dual booting was not that hard for me.

But... Their are still some flaws in mandrake 10.

Micrll

http://www.linuxsolved.com/forums/ftopic125.html

^I'm planning on following that guide, only one problem: I don't have a floppy drive.

Anyway I can use a USB Flash Drive instead?

Better yet, can I make a USB Flash drive equivalent of a boot floppy?

Sorry to bring this old thread up again, but I didn't think I should create a new one.