Please Help A Noob, Quick Question About Dual Boot
 

:newbie:
I have windows XP installed on one drive and I have Mandrakelinux Official 10.0. I have 2 hard drives. If I install Linux on my second drive will it leave windows alone and give me the option to boot either one at startup? Like, will it change the boot.ini? If not, is it as simple as changing the boot.ini? If so what should be added to the file. Thanks for any help.

you'll probably need need a /boot partition of about 100M and type ext2 to be put in front of your XP partition on HD0 -- that'll house your new boot info... XP, and MS in general does NOT have the capability to boot other OSes that are not by MS... you will need to use a linux bootloader, or otherwise non-MS bootloader...

I dont know what you mean by "type ext2 to be put in front of your XP partition on HD0"
Also I forgot to ask, should the linux drive be NTFS or something else, and what partitions should it have, I know /boot, but what else?

If you install Mandrake 10.0 official onto a secondary hard drive (slave) it won't disturb your Windows data at all.
What it will do, however, is overwrite your Windows boot file. This is OK though, as it will replace it with a bootloader of its own called lilo. Mandrake 10.0 will recognise your Windows partition and add it to the bootloader automatically as the last entry.
When you reboot you'll be presented with a blue screen with a lot of Linux boot options with Windows being last on the list. Simply choose which OS you want to boot and you're away.

EDIT During the install, if you let Mandrake define its own partitions, this is usually OK for most users. You can create your own if you want to though: as a bare minimum you'll need a / (root) partition a 'swap' partition and a 'home' partition. If you've got a fast PC with loads of RAM then size your swap at about 512Mb. The standard file system for Linux is Ext 2 or 3 (Mandrake uses Ext 3 by default) - you can't install Linux on an NTFS partition.

well.. you don't need /home, technically... you could get by with just / and swap.

i like to make / /home /usr/src /boot and swap... but that's just preference...

Thanks guys, I'm going to give it a try tonight and sounds like it should be no problem.

Everything worked. I now have windows xp on one drive, Linux on the other, and can choose what I want to boot into at startup. Thanks and this thread can be closed.