I am trying to instal mandrake official 10 alongside win xp. Win xp is installed on a 80GB striped raid. I then added a new 80GB hdd to the ide 1 slot.

When I try to install mandrake to the new drive the installation locks up at the building bootloader stage. I am a newbie to linux and wonder what I should do next? The mbr for win xp must be on the raid drive, but will the new bootloader write over this or try to create a new mbr on the new drive.

I have already had a bad experience with the comunity version of mandrake 10 destroying my win xp installation with a similar bug, please help.

I have been dual booting mandrake and the windows in turn (98, 2k, xp) for a long time and never had a problem, so I'll tell you what I do.

I have now xp and mandrake 10.0 official.

Before I can tell you exactly, I need you to tell my a couple of things.

First, my native language is not english, and although I speak, read and write english quite well, I don't understand certain words or phrases, You say something about a stripped raid in which you installed xp. what's that? (a stripped raid?)

Finally, could you tell me briefly but with more details, about the instalation process. For instance, when you say it screw up while installing the bootloader, then you already partitioned for mandrake, and packages were already copied, am I right?

As for the bootleader, you can install it in any hard drive you want (doing certain things at the end of the mandrake instalation process), not conflicting with xp mbr, provided your bios can boot from a non-master hdd.

For you to have an idea, my configuration:

HDD 1 (Master IDE1): 80Gb with xp.
HDD 2 (Slave IDE1): 40 Gb with Mandrake.

each partitioned further.

Lilo is installed in HDD 2's mbr, an in bios I selected to boot from HDD2. Then if I re-install winxp (which I do very often) xp rewrites in HDD 1 mbr, but that does not deletes lilo, because is in hdd2.

If this is enough for you, let me know, or if you need more details.