Hello all, my first post, nice to be here. Man I need some help. I have a PII 450 MHx system with 400 MB ram and 2 HDs. First one has W2K, and second I am using to install SUSE linux.

I told SUSE to use the entire second drive which it recognized w/o problems and let it do the partitioning. When SUSE start loading the packages (I chose all of them) I get LOTS of errors returned after certain packages are installed. I mean lots, out of 439 or os packages I saw 60-70 errors that I had to say "OK" to. Programs like Apache, Samba, NTFS, and etc, all returned errors.

Why so many errors?

This gets even better, after the install was done, I got an error saying the root user could not be made so i would not be able to login at all! What?

The install was looking great until all this came up.
Someone PLEASE help me??????

ok... first things first. how did you partition the drives? w2k is an extremely unpolite o/s to dual boot from. if it doesn't have the mbr, then it causes problems. luckily, there's a w2k bootmanager that can boot other o/s's, unfortunately, i've never used it, so i can't help much there.

the mbr needs to be left to w2k - using lilo will almost certainly cause problems. but... what you want to do first, is try to get a minimal system going. don't worry about the 1500 packages or so that suse comes with... do a minimal installation, and try to get that booting. installing additional packages afterwards with yast is pretty easy.

one more question... how large are the two drives? particularly the linux drive?

Hello isajera, thanks for your help.

The W2K drive is 40 GB and the second Linux drive is 10 GB.

I let SUSE partition the second drive which appeared it was going to make only 3 partitions, / , /swap, and /boot I believe.

I chose to have LILO put on a floppy disk and not have any thing come close to my W2K drive or the MBR. But it did not want to accept any diskette I put in the drive, always saying it was unformatted, when it did not even read the disk to even know that. However, the diskette I used was formatted. Is there a way to format the diskette for Linux even if I don't have Linux installed?

I will try again doing a minimal install just to see if I can get something to work correctly.

Keep the help coming, as I am totally stumped. Everything is appreciated.

i've never installed a dual-boot with w2k myself, but i found this site from someone who has:

www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00011.asp

the guy used mandrake 7 to install linux, but that shouldn't be a problem.

this site also looked pretty good

www.hardcorelinux.com/dual-boot-linux.htm

it seems offhand that the hardest part is getting the partitions correct. but generally, if you leave the mbr alone when partitioning, you should be ok. if w2k still boots, then you're fine. hope this helps!