Well, it happened to me once.

One thing that you could do, is to partition the unallocated space with partition magic. Made the partitions for linux. Make sure that your D:\ partition is an Extended partition, because windows cannot recognize 2 primary partitions. Under linux you could have more than 1 Primary partition.

Then made your linux partitions, as primary at least the boot partition.

I know that the latest Linux Distro dont have this problem with lilo anymore I don't know if Mandrake has this feature fixed, I guess that the answer is YES. But I rarely has use Mandrake, so I'm not sure about it.

I hope this help.

thanks...

yes, I guess Mandrake has it fixed. I'm using version 7.1 which coresponds to, what, Red Hat 6.x ?

anyway, I had that in mind first. To format the unallocated as Linux using partition magic but I read on one of these forums that this would arise problems and it would be better to leave it unformatted and let the Linux installation do the job. So I did it that way.

I gave it a thought and I think I have the solution.

If I could restore my MBR to its previous state (win2k only) and make GRUB (lilo) be installed on hda6 (Linux root) then maybe my problem would be resolved. What do you think?

I have to make sure about that 1024 limitation, though....

Not Sure About it. I know that Mandrake is very similar to Red Hat. But I don't which version correspont to which version.

I know that is better to leave linux to format the partition, But to make sure that is not going to happend again, you could made the partitions with Partition Magic, then when you are installing linux, the only thing that you have to do, is mount the partition and format them again, you dont have to create them. So maybe that will help you to keep the Windows partitions in Windows and the Linux partitions in Linux.

Well, IF you could restore the MBR for W2K, that will be a miracle, because I dont know how to restore it, I have screw up W2k 2 times, before find out where to install lilo. I'm not sure where was suppose to be installed I always forgot where I install it.

I guest that it was in the root partition. Try to made it in this way, so maybe linux will not get both partitions in one.