Well i am trying to dual boot my system with windows xp pro and mandrake 10 but things don't seem to be going well for me so far. I have 2-80gb drives, My master drive is completley windows and the slave is partially storage and i want to have linux on the remaining 20gb. Now when i install mandrake and use it default bootloader settings (still a newb) and i restard after the setup i get a really stupid screen. Where it usually says "Boot from cdrom" it says below it "L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99" More 99's tho), so i am forced so boot with the mandrake cd and restore the windows bootloader so i can use windows again but i cant use mandrake even tho its there. I attempted the install on my slave drive (hdb) and put the bootloader on the MBR when the install asked. So wtf is up can someone please help me out. Ive gone thru the install 3 times so far and it still don't work. I've tried Grub as well and on the same area it just says GRUB below "boot from cd-rom", i cant type anything either, i needed to restore the xp bootloader. I don't understand this, please someone.
My windows drive has 3 partitions as well, a 1.5GB at the head of the drive as my pagefile, 68.3GB as the main system, and 6.25GB for backup purposes. My slave drive has a 58GB partition on it (ntfs) as storage as well, just in case theres a problem with what i have setup, but i cant really change it around without reformatting windows which I'm not planning on anytime soon.

Hi shlepp,
The problem that you faced, comes from bootloader. XP and Mandrake 10 have their own bootloader that they install in installation process. XP will install bootloader into primary master harddisk MBR. If you want to have a dual boot machine, you have to use either XP boot manager by including mandrake 10 entry into boot menu or install lilo or grub into primary master harddisk MBR to replace XP bootloader. Did you make a boot floppy during installation ? If you did, just booting with floppy and change the bootloader from Mandrake Control Center > Boot > Login and select to install lilo or grub into primary master hardisk MBR.
Hope this help.

Amri

i didnt make a floppy but i know how to quickly make one without reinstalling mandrake completley. Ille give this a try. thanks.

ok i think mandrake 10 is very very retarded atthis point cuz it kept complaining about some error that it cant overwrite filesystem (on a floppy), theres nothing wrong with the floppy, it was just formatted in xp to erase it, i can copy files to and from it ok and they arent corrupt so i have no clue what its deal is (that was for Lilo) then i tried grub on the floppy and it just sits where it shuld boot and says GRUB on the bottom of the screen below "boot from cdrom" on startup.