Hi. I currently have windows 98 installed on a 20MB HD.

I heard Mandrake's installation would take care of re-partitioning the HD in order to make room for a linux partition.

Does it really do that, and how reliable is this process? I mean, can I expect my existing files to remain intact in the shrinked fat32 partition that will be created?

Thank you

I have heard it will do a fine job, make sure to defragment your drive in windows first.. and I hope you have a larger drive than 20 MB, unless you mean 20 GB....

and always to be safe, backup any files you want to keep, in case of disaster of course.

-trickykid

My very first experience with linux was last month I bought mandrake 8.1.
At the same time, I bought Partition Magic 7.0.

Then when I got home and looked thru the mandrake user's manual - I found out the mandrake install automatically re-partitions your windoze drive.

Doh! Wasted big bucks on PM 7.0!! Its just sitting on my bookshelf unused.

Mandrake re-partitioned the drive perfectly. I didn't have to answer any questions or anything, just sat back and let the install do everything.

I already had win98 on my 40 Gb drive. Now the dual-boot option works perfectly and everything...

In my opinion, it is best to have two hard drives. One for windows and the other for Linux. If windows screws up, always does, then you have Linux to correct it.

Putting Windows and Linux on the same drive can be done but you will run in some problems in the future. Just do what trickykid told you and it will work. Use DOS defrag or Norton Speed Disk for DOS because in Windows the swap file and temp files can be located at the end after you exit. This way all your files is in the beginning. For fast defragging use space instead of full.

I suggest you don't make Fat32 for Linux. Try changing the LINUX parition to Linux Native if you do see Fat32 on the Linux paritions.

Try to make a boot disk so that you can re-make LILO if windows screws up.

In motherboard BIOS, let the BIOS detect your device. In simple terms, turn off PNP. Also if you have a ZIP drive, turn that channel that the ZIP drive is connect to. Zip drives gets in the way of paritioning programs such as FDISK and many others.