I have been running a dual boot system for over a year now, W98 and MDK 9.2. I have two hard drives, W98 and MDK are on the hda, it is a 10 gig disk. There two 2 gig parts for w98. MDK has a root swap and home, occupying 6 gig.

I added a 120 gig drive, and made three partitions for /data /music and /pictures (20 gigs each). That leaves 60 gig of free space.

I have read through a lot of doc on installing MDK 10.1, and have installed enough to be familiar with the installer.

Some questions I can not find answers for. Do I need to create another swap partition if I install MDK 10.1 to the free space? or can it use the existing swap?

Do I need to create another /home partition? I don't want to upgrade 9.2. I have a parallel port scanner that workd under 9.2. It took a long time to get it going and the patches probably don't exist for MDK 10.1.

My intention now is to triple boot, until I settle any ( or all ) of the configuration problems I may ( probably will ) encounter.

If your intent is not to touch the existing swap partition, Mandrake 10.1 will indeed work with it.

If /home exists on it's own partition, there will be no need to create another one.

/Home can be shared among differing versions of Linux if this is the case.

However in spite of your scanner problems it is FAR more likely that 10.1 will work with your scanner "out of the box".

You may find that it will work immediately.

To test this, try downloading the freebie Mandrake Move CD.

If booting from the CD, causes the "Live" (run from CD) version to discover your scanner, you'll be safe going right to 10.1... which is advisable.

Thank-you for the thoughtful suggestions. I'll give the Live CD a try.