Okay.. I'm back, on Windows XP, and I had much better results than expected. I have yet to reinstall Mandrake, but I'd like some opinions on a question I have before I take the time to do that.

I managed to install from Restore Disks which gave me the option of repartitioning the hard drive and reformatting the partitions the way I wanted. This was an excellent feature! I made four partitions - three of equal size, one for Windows, one for Linux, and one for shared stuff, and a fourth much smaller one for Linux swap space.

I thought the installer would put Windows on the C drive, and take part of it to recreate the mirror. However, it instead took both C and D - two of the biggest drives - even though the mirror needs nothing more than a little space. I'm wondering if it's worth it to go back through the entire process and create five drives.. two for windows, two for linux and one shared?

Or, is it okay to use the remainder of the image drive to put files and stuff on that Linux and Windows will share?

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

The drive with the image on it would be fine as long as the partition is fat32 then linux will be able to read it.

edit: and write to, which is important

Yes, it is. As far as I know you can resize Windows drives and give the space to the "images" partition.