Hi

I have a two hard drives in my machine, with XP and Vista on 1st drive, with a windows partition and spare partition on the second drive.

I'd like to install Mandriva 2008 on the spare partition. Could anyone tell me if there are any issues with installing a linux bootloader (e.g. Grub) as I understand that Vista doesn't want to play with any other OS's.

Regards

D

This is a nice graphical guide: http://apcmag.com/node/5162/

To tell the truth, given my preferences (assuming I needed to have Linux, WinXP, and Vista available), I would install Linux to the first hard drive, then install XP and Vista in VM's so I could access all OS's with no need to reboot. This arrangement would provide the stability, security and superior memory management Linux is famous for in the base OS (but you should still set up good system security for the Windows OS's if they will access the Internet). This arrangement would involve a considerable amount of effort, as well as the possibility that you could lose some of your existing data (it's so easy to forget to back up data for some seldom used application), so (depending on your level of expertise, and how much time you spend rebooting between OS's each day) the results may not be worth your while. I only add this note for your consideration,

Hi Ernie, how-to?

I reboot all the time.

Cheers, Glenn

Thanks for the input.

Unfortunately due to my work I have to use XP and Vista but prior to adding Vista I installed XP / Mandriva for a number of years.

It's just annoying that MS have decided to make it difficult by changing the boot routines in Vista.

SHould be no problem. Just make sure to install Mandriva LAST. I'm assuming Mandriva uses GRUB now? If it uses GRUB, then you can easily add the Windows Vista into GRUB, which will then let you choose Windows XP or Vista. Or, you could easily create an entry for Windows XP and Windows Vista in GRUB. Your choice. I'm sure you can do this with LILO, but I haven't used LILO since Mandriva 9.1!!!

Your current set up is fine, no need to reinstall OS's on different drives.

An older OS will not recognise a newer OS, therefore you must install xp then vista.

You will need a swap partition of about 1 gig somewhere.

There should be no problems with linux, it will see the other operating systems and make a place mark for you to access the boot loader for each of them.
Grub and lilo are boot loaders not extra layers between the os and a machine.

If you need to repair xp or vista, when your done just reinstall the boot loader.

Similar to this. IF xp needs repair or re-install (the microsoft mantra) when complete reboot with the vista cd and repair the boot loader (look it up) for vista. This should now include xp and vista, but whe are not finished yet.

Next, and after you have made sure that xp and vista are working,

Reboot with the linux cd, choose repair/rescue and repair/reinstall the boot loader. It should then get you the choices of any three os on the system.

This last repair will list any windows partitions so (hd with bootable primary partition), if you have fat or ntfs partitions that are not boot drives, like for data only, you may want to remove the listings for those.

On mine I have 4 windows partitions and the second drive comes up as windows1. It found the partition but not the OS.

So I just remove it from grub by going to, Mandriva Control Center/Boot/Setup Boot System/

click next to see the list.

You can edit the list here.

You should have no problems.

Cheers, Glenn