I have absolutely no experience with Linux but am very anxious to learn. A friend told me that I should install Mandrake as it's a good linux program to start with.

I have Windows 2000 installed on a seperate harddrive...I temporarily took out that harddrive and put in a new one to install mandrake on. I completed the installation of mandrake and I must say I liked it very much. Seemed to be very easy to configure for the novice like me.

My question is this...since I have win 2000 on one harddrive and Mandrake on another....can I put them both in, one as master and one as slave, and then tell my bios which one to boot to? A friend said I could and I tried it but all I can get to boot is win 2000...Mandrake give me some errors right in the beginning and then stops. I take out the Win2k drive then make the Mandrake drive the only one on there computer and it boots into mandrake fine.
Is there something I can use that will give me a choice to boot from one to another without hurting my win2k drive. I have a lot of important files on it and don't want to lose it. Plus that fact that I have to wean myself slowly from windows over to linux.
Any help and suggestions would be greatly appreiciated.

You have to install the boot loader into your primary hdd, and then you can boot into both OS . You have not specified whether you use GRUB or LILO. Specify it and we can try to help you.

Also, you have not specified how you installed mandrake, whether booting that hdd as primary or secondary, as this is also important.

Alternatively, search through this site, and you will get a lot of similar queries and results.

thanks for the reply back. I booted from the cdrom for installation of Mandrake. What happened was I had win2000 already installed on one harddrive. I took that one out and then seperately installed another harddrive by itself and that one I put Mandrake on. At this time I am not using GRUB or LILO. I had someone tell me that I could put my win2k as my master and my linux as my slave after mandrake installation and then choose it in the bios as to which one I wanted to boot. Obvioulsy that won't work.
So in starting from scratch which would be the proper way to do this? Do I leave my win2k hardrive as master, put in the secondary formatted drive as slave. Start win2k then put the mandrake cd in and install it to the secondary and then install LILO when prompted?
Thanks for the help...sorry to be such a novice. I want to learn and I realize I have alot to learn. I just installed mandrake for the heck of it and It really sparked my interest.

Since you installed linux on single hard drive. Your fstab entries will be wrong. The Mandrake harddrive will be listed as /dev/hda1 when it is now /dev/hdb1. Youmay have more partitions. All the listings for /dev/hda need to be switched to /dev/hdb. to use the win2000 boot loader you will have to copy the bootsector from Mandrake drive and put it on win2000 disk ie:linboot.img using dd. Idon't remember how much you have to copy rightnow though. You have to make the boot.ini file editable andplacean entry into it that points to the boot image. You will also have to figure out the correct partition definition for the drive. I think you can just take the win2000 partition string and change the first number by adding one to it.
You can change the info on Mandrake disk by using cd to boot into rescue mode. when it starts to boot press f1 and type in rescue. When the rescue setup comes up. mount the partitions under mnt and then switch to console mode. Notice one of the options when first entering console mode is to fixboot. It will require lilo.conf to have been set up. fixboot can set up a linux boot loader. This can be dangerous if you don't know what you are doing. It would more than likely overwrite the win2000 boot area. Go to /mnt/etc and fix drive definitions in fstab before anything else though.

would it be safe to say then that the best thing to do at this time, being the novice that I am, would be to format the mandrake hard drive and reinstall it as a slave to my win2000 master then reinstall Mandrake to the slave hard drive and install LILO when prompted? Then at this time I would imagine that when I reboot it gives me the option to go to win2000 or mandrake?
If this would be the best thing...when installing mandrake...do I start the cd from win2000 or do I boot mandrake up with the cdrom then install from there?