Hello

I have a dual boot machine running Windows 7 (RC1) and Suse 11.1. I share this machine with my brother who wants to try Mandriva 2009. Rather than run it from the CD I would like to install it on our computer and have a triple boot machine so that he can save any changes that he makes to his Mandriva setup, which he can't do with a live CD.

What I have read so far leads me to think that there may be problems because Mandriva uses a different boot loader from Suse. And the methods that are suggested to make it triple boot seem extremely complicated to me - I haven't been using Linux for very long. Can anyone point me in the direction of a "How to..." or, better still tell me how to set about installing Mandriva alongside Suse and Windows, please?

When I installed Suse on the machine I just booted using the Suse CD and clicked on the install icon. When it had finished and I re booted the machine I had a boot menu offering me either Suse or Windows. Will this approach work in this case?

Here are two options:
1) Don't install a bootloader for Mandriva and configure the Suse bootloader to start Mandriva

2) Install a bootloader on the Mandriva root drive (not to MBR) and chainload it with the Suse bootloader.

Do a search on this forum for dual/triple/multi boot tutorials.

I'm not sure Mandriva and Opensuse have different bootloaders, I have OS 10.3 and Mandriva 2008 and they both use Grub but that may have changed.

The thing you need to be careful about is the partitions. You need to know which partitions have Opensuse and windows, running the fdisk -l command should give you this so you don't install over Opensuse.

Usually the last item in an install is the bootloader. You should get a wiwndow (if you use graphical install) asking about how/where you want to install the bootloader. The default will be to mbr and that will overwrite your current bootloader so select the root partition of Mandriva as suggested above. If you don't see an option to install to the root partition, you will probably have to click on an Advanced tab during the bootloader install to get the option.

Hi yancek and mdg,

Many thanks for your replies. Being something of a coward and fairly new to Linux I think I am going to have to leave it for the moment. I have just done 'fdisk -l' but don't really understand the output with regard to where I could install Mandriva.

fdisk -l said:

/dev/sda1 has Id 7 and the system is HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 has Id 7 and the system is HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 has Id 83 and the system is Linux
/dev/sda4 has Id f with system W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 Id b system W95 FAT32
/dev/sda6 Id 82 System Linux swap /Solaris
/dev/sda7 Id 83 Linux

I don't understand why the HD appears to have seven partitions of which two(sda4 and sda5) appear to be connected with an obsolete version of Windows. There is an asterisk beside sda4; presumably this is where the computer boots from?

Perhaps I should learn to walk before I try running!

sda4 is an extended partition in which you can create logical partitions. An extended partition cannot contain any data. Don't know what sda5 would be.

Multi-booting isn't that hard and there are numerous tutorials on how to do it. I'd suggest you read up on it to familiarize yourself.

Since you didn't post the actual fdisk output, it would be difficult for anyone to tell you specifically how to install Mandriva.