Hello
I am very new to Linux so please bare with me. I have two hard drives on my computer, the first one has Win98 on it, and on the second one I want to install Mandrake 8.1 . How do I go about it?

It there is something important on the second hd, copy it to the first one.
Then just reboot, insert the installation cd and start installation :-)

Mara, if it were that simple, Linux should've taken over
the desktop market.

Oh yes, install it. Boot the CD up. Choose recommended.
When asked, pick HD2. The things you should pay attention
to is install bootloader. Pick Grub. Edit the menu so
Win98 is default. Timeout is 30 seconds. Install Grub on
MBR (first sector of HD1, normally /dev/hda). Enjoy!

jetblackz.. it is that easy. firstly use lilo. it's nicer, and easier to configure.

one thing i ususally recommend is to put windows on the slave channel, and linux on the master. doing this will then mean you'll install lilo on the boot sector of the linux drive and NOT the windows drive, consequently your windows drive will NEVER be even slightly altered by linux, so you can just unplug the drive, put windows back on master and you'd have enver known it was there, 100% worry free. you will probably, unless your install is clever to do it for you, need to alter the lilo.conf file after install to make windows boot tho, but it's worth it. you'll need to add something like...

other=/dev/hdb1
label=windows
table=/dev/hdb
map-drive=0x80
to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80

and tehn re run lilo as root

this just lies to windows about what channel it's on. but as i said the benefit of this is that you NEVER risk anything on the windows drive.