okie, newbie here again =P arnt we played everyone is trying to convert? heh..

anyway, i have reformatted my hard drive, and created two main partitions. my main is running windows and the rest are un-touched... when i tried to install mandrake linux, it says i need to mount the partition first with "/" when i typed that, it said that it is not possible and some other stuff... i duno if i should mount as /boot... what does that means?

if i am not wrong, that partition is in a FAT32 format... under windows when i clikc on that drive it says "drive e: is not formatted, do u want to format it now?"

do i need to use a program, like maybe windows's computer management > disk managment to format it as NTFS before i can instal mandrake onto it?

also, once i have done that, does it mean after installing mandrake (if it was successful) i would get a screen when i turn on my computer immediately choosing which OS i want to boot into? or is there some other steps i need to do to get this "dual booting option" ?

all help will be greatly appreciated!!

you want to delete that partition totally. having a partition which just happens to have nothign in it isn't any use as it's still using up all the space. delete it and let mandrake allocate the space as it sees fit. the mandrake installer should let you do all of this though.

for dualbooting, yes you will get a bootloader, either "lilo" or "grub" with a pretty splash screen, menu etc... mandrake should take care of this compeltely too

Actually you should START by first installing Windows, and THEN Linux.