Ok i just got Mandrake 9.2 up on this pc with is good and well but my mother wanted to install is on her second harddrive so i urged her in to it.
The poblem is that When the partition options come up i havent a clue what to do whilst keeping all of my mothers XP install wich she CAN NOT loose or i loose my head.
The other problem is now it wants to boot in to windows 95 when we go to boot XP back up ( i know thats probably just an MBR thing) but ye its adding to her nerve and making the situation.


A swift reply would be greatly appreciated as she is eager to get in to the linux OS and GNU scene but also eager to figure out how to get back to XP.

(also, the HDD is 37 gigs big and when we clock auto-allocate it says not enough space)
there is some but barely any space used on that partition so its weird it would say that ( and would doing the auto- option erase the things that are already on the disk?)

That is -mind you- the secondary disk, the primamry is the windows xp instal and is not where we want to install mandrake.

Please help.,

Hi!
Could you post a "map" of your (yours mom's ) hard disks?
The output of "fdisk -l" would be nice; if not, something like
and also the size of the hard disks, and how much free space (formated and unformated) you have. As much information as you have.
Regards

Hello, My mother's kids had a friggin win95 boot disk in the bloody floppy drive AHAH- *scuse me*.
So ye we had to defragment the (F) drive because when we tryed to install linux to the whole f drive (at one stage we gave up and nearly just put it all over the f partition)
Drakx ( i think that was the name) wanted to re-size or somthing and it had an error and said we needed to defrag her drive through winxp.

So thats done and were mooving all the crap we need of F to C and were going to just throw it all over F.

Will be prompted to use either linux or windows xp in Lillo or will it only display Linux and be difficult reasoning most peoples decision to stick with windows?.

I love the reason why linux is here, i support GNU, Hell me and my partner are trying to get a re-distributing company up (www.oz-linux.com) But when its always so difficult its hard to do anything seamlessly w/o an error (was that a new oxy-moron?).

BTW Most linux partitions uses there own partitions i.e. not FAT or NTFS.
That is way the install wanted to create partitons with unallocated disk space or resize an existing partition. As a min you need 2 partitions:
/ (root)
swap

Since you want to use the space from the f drive once the data is copied then have the installer delete that partition and create partitions using that free space.