partitioning and booting
 

Hi all,
I am planning to install Suse on my Toshiba Laptop.
I have some questions concerning partitioning and booting.
I have winXP pre-installed on primary drive C: (27GB) and an extended partition with two logical partitions (D: and E:).
I plan to resize my C: and make another an ext2 partiton for linux with partition magic. It will be placed after drive E: and i assumed it is not bootable.
Can I installed Linux on the drive actually?
And I don't plan to install Lilo or Grub in the MBR since I dont want to overwrite the it. I will install it in the /root of linux partiton. I plan to use bootmagic to boot my machine later.
So, will this works??? Or am I missing something here?
Please help. Any comment is appreciated.
Thanks

Or, is it possible to not use any bootloader but modify the XP boot.ini??

You are also going to need a swap partition along with your ext2 partition and the partition you use for WinXP. Sounds like you want to continue using ntldr as your boot loader. This is no problem it just takes a little more work to get things set up. When you install SUSE it should ask you where you want to put the boot loader. You should put this in the same partition as SUSE and not the mbr. It is also a good idea to make a boot disk. This will allow you to boot up SUSE just by inserting the boot disk. Once the install is complete you can set up ntldr with an entry to boot linux. There is a good set of directions at http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue36/larriera.html. Enjoy!

Bill

thanks.
But i dont have a floppy drive.

Doesn't matter, this will still work for you. The boot disk is a safety measure in case you have to boot into linux because something fails. I don't know for sure on SUSE, but most distributions will allow you to boot using the installation CD. Read the help on the initial screen. For example, with Fedora I can type 'linux rescue' at the prompt and it locates my installation. However, once ntldr is setup this all becomes mute since Linux becomes just another option on the ntldr menu.

Bill