OK so i am completely new to linux and i figured that instead of getting a book and using that to walk me through it, i would sort of wing it... well as it turns out this is more of an adventure than installing XP (no soothing music). My situation is that i need windows XP and i want linux... so i took my old 40GB hard drive and got that running again (scraps from my crappy HP) and i figured that i would be able to use that for linux and just play with my bios when i needed to return to windows for games and such. so when i first tried to install mandrake 10.1 it stalled even before it was loaded into memory... and i had a similar problem with knoppix and it had to do with my USB mouse, so i switched to a ps2 mouse and it worked fine. it said it loaded the program into memory and then when it said installing VIA sata etc etc... drivers it froze! the thing is i don't even need it to recognize my sata drive for what i want to do... so is there a command where i can just disable sata detection? or another way to fix this? (keeping in mind that the drivers that i have for my sata are on a floppy and my floppy drive situation doesn't allow for those to be used)

PS: i forgot to include this but i'm running 1GB of ram (pc 3200)

I'm not sure how much this will help you, but could you try installing Mandriva LE 2005 instead of 10.1? The reason why I'm suggesting this is that in some reviews I read while researching your mobo, they mentioned that RECENT version of the kernel have driver support for your board. Now recent is a very vague term, so I don't exactly know how recent it means, but it makes me suspect that perhaps a newer version of the operating system MIGHT help you out. Mandriva LE 2005 is basically Mandrake 10.2, they just changed naming systems.

A second thing. There are two ways that you can do this dual booting of Windows XP and Mandriva. One is the way you're doing it. Each harddrive will be COMPLETELY separate and have it's own booter and everything. Then you go into the BIOS and tell it which harddrive you want it to boot from and that determines which OS you'll start up in. That's a bit inconvenient though. Do a search for dual booting walkthroughs online (you should be able to find one for Mandriva or Mandrake, either will be just as easy to follow). There is a fairly simple way to share a bootloader so that when your computer boots up, it will take you to a menu that will let you decide which OS you want to start up. This is the preferred way of dual booting.

Check out the Linux Tutorials link at this site. You should be able to find help on how to do a dual booting system there. It will save you many future headaches. Also, as with anytime you're doing something this drastic with your computer, BACK UP important files and data. Nothing should go wrong, but having back ups and peace of mind is so much better.

EDIT: BTW, that's a really nice computer you've got there. If you want good driver support for that ATI card though (for games, 3d rendering, etc), you're probably going to want to use the 32 bit version of Mandriva. If you'd rather make your processor as fast as you can make it, go ahead and use the 64 bit version.

LOL so yea... leave it to me to overlook the most basic solution available... i just turned off sata in my bios and it worked like a charm! now i just gotta get from this command line to a nice gui interface... i chose to install all interfaces (gnome, kde, etc). if you know of any places where i can find a complete command list for 10.1 i would be interested . thanks btw for your help! i always heard the linux community was nice and its actually true!

It's strange that you have a command line. Did you do a custom install or something because by default you SHOULD go straight to a nice gui. When you are at the command line, can you log in? If so, typing:

startx

SHOULD take you to a nice GUI environment. If you can log in as root, then typing:

kdm

should take you to the normal login screen for Mandriva. Something still seems a bit funny though. If you get a chance could you look in the file:

/etc/inittab

and look for a line that SHOULD read:

id:5:initdefault

If it instead reads:

id:3:initdefault

then that is your problem. Change the 3 to a 5 and from then on you'll boot up to a nice pretty GUI environment. As far as commands go, most of them are common to all linux distributions.

The command:

info coreutils

will get you a lot of very confusing information, but it's a good thing to remember. The following website has a good list of basic Linux commands. Many of them you won't use right away, but many of them are nice to know.

http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/d...0/ch24s04.html

Specific to Mandriva is the command urpmi which installs software. If you want to install nano, a simple text editor, you would do:

urpmi nano

as root. You can change from a normal user to root at any time with the su command. But before installing anything you're going to have to set up your package sources. A google search for:

easy urpmi

will give you information on how to do that. I think that will give you a good head start at Linux. BTW, thanks for calling me nice. I can't say that EVERYONE on this forum is nice, but the average person on here definitely is. One thing you'll learn very quickly though, is that the Linux community is MUCH less forgiving of noobs than the Windows community. If you get called a retard a couple times by some random jackass, please don't take it personally as they most likely have issues, not you. Have fun learning.