xp on hardrive,how to mandriva 10.1
 

hy,i have got xp on my hardrive using about 30gig on an 80gig drive,my question is how to go about installing mandriva 10.1 on the drive while keeping my xp intact,i have got knoppix livecd if that is any help to partition my hardrive,i want to use about 20gig total for my linux partition,can anybody help me in the way i do it?
thanx

Mandriva will partition it for you. If your Windows install is taking up the entire hdd, you'll need to resize it to 30~35GB with a partitioning tool, maybe PartitionMagic. I'm not sure if fdisk recognises what cylinders have data written to them, so it'd be difficult to do it with it. However, if your 30GB is separate from the other [unallocated] 50 of the hdd, you wouldn't have any worries.

And at the end of the install, Mandriva will install Lilo or Grub, a bootloader that will allow you to choose which OS to boot after POST.

like i say ,i have got about 45gig free space on my single 80gig hardrive,30 gig is used for win xp and most of that is my cd collection,i have not got a dvd burner,if i had i would burn my collection to dvd and start from scratch(i just do not want to go through rippin my cd,s to mp3's @ 320 again,wow man it took me ages)anyway.....i have succesfully burned the three iso images to disk and i am about to defrag my hddrv,will need more help in a bit.
thanx

Then since it's unallocated space, you won't have any problem. Mandriva will walk you through everything (it's easier than installing XP).

ok, after deleting a load of cr*p and defraggin,windows takes about 23gig,so i think i can safely go with about 30gig for my mandriva installation,so when i start what do i allocate to what(like home,dev1 ect ect)or is it just one format? and should i go with lilo or grub,thanx in advance(i am currently using knoppixlivecd to type this cause i don't want my hddrve messed up)it is fat32

anybody?cause i'm ready to stick my first disk in an give it a shot

I'd partition the 30 in half, giving 15 to / and 15 to /home. Put ReiserFS or ext3 filesystems on both partitions. Lilo I think is used by default in Mandriva, so there isn't much of a choice until you get to desktop.

it did everything auto,never asked me to do anything only how big i want windows,i got 45gig windows and 29gig mandriva,wow it's fast but it did not sort out my internet connection,i'm on broadband dsl by bt using the voyager 205 adsl router connected by ethernet,so it found eth0 but i can't config it,any ideas,thanx for your help up to now,plse keep it comming.knoppix on livecd seems to have more programs,unless some are hidden,i'm not complaining,mebe i just got to play with it for a few days,kd3 for instance,is it not available with mandriva and if not what do i use?i found kd3 but still no internet,shall i try it with the usb port instead of the ethernet port,jeez i hate not havin an internet conection

Are you connected through a router, and are you using DHCP? I think you can run net-setup in shell (this might be a Gentoo-only thing) and set it up there. If you can get on the net with Knoppix, maybe copy over the conf files.

I don't use Mandriva, so sorry I can't give more specific help.