I was helping my brother install Mandrake onto his computer (dual boot) and we wanted to keep the M$ bootloader instead of grub. (Bad experience in the past w/ grub killing all ability to access windoze) The problem is that our turtorial must have been based upon an older version of Mandrake because it didn't give us the option to make a boot disk at the end. Well, he has both OSes now - one on each HDD. We need to copy the boot 512 bits (or kbits -w/e) into M$ so that the win bootloader knows where to go and what to load. But the only way to copy these bits is by loading into Mandrake. So we have a bit of a catch22. If anyone knows an ez way around this or a way to have a Mandrake boot disk, let us know. We know how to proceed from there.

I had a computer laying around here at work and a spare hdd so I thought i'd step through the whole setup process to see what happens. As you said no option at the end to make a bootdisk (hmm..) and then after I booted into Mandrake 10.0, I couldn't find it anywhere in the configuration options either. So I looked it up on Google. turns out, at least from what I understand of it, that the kernel used in Mdk 10.x is too big to fit on a floppy, and you have to either use MandrakeMove (a live linux cd just like Knoppix) or a custom boot cd to get into your linux filesystem.

here's the link for the boot cd howto:
http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=11801

here's a link to Mandrake Move:
ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/d...move/2.0/i586/

And here's a link to Knoppix (latest is 3.6):
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/knoppix/

Hope this helps a bit.

Well, we have knoppix, but once he's in there does he need to do something special to bring up the right boot info?

I think i've found something useful here:
http://portal.suse.com/sdb/en/2002/1...l_grub_nt.html

Although the article talks about SuSe it should also be applicable to Mandrake I think.