I am looking to install Suse onto a PC with two FAT32 HDs. I have PC and windows knowlegdge, but little practical experience with the nuts and bolts of Linux.

Currently, the PC is running W98 on the primary HD and I want to install Suse onto the second HD and duel boot between the 2 OSs (I still need to use some windows apps).

My question is "What will Suse do to my second HD?".

Will I be able to read the second HD from W98 or the first one from Suse? and will having 2 OSs on two different HDs cause me may other problems?

And, how will Suse take take my existing 10/100 tpc/ip lan (used to share cable broadband via a netgear f114p router with integrated print server).

MY current harware profile is

VIA VT6102 Rhine II ethernet
Creative labs PCI64 sound card
K7VM2 series motherboard (ASROck I/Owith an older AMD Duron chip and an integrated Graphics card
and an ATI rage 128 all in wonder AGP graphics card (one of the reasons why I want to keep W98)

You will probably have the best luck if you replace the second HD with linux. Either move things you want to keep onto the first HD, or resize windows partition and install linux on the freed up space. Before installing Linux, run chkdisk and optimize the hard drive so that the information is located at the beginning of the drive. There will be a page come up asking which drive to use, and whether to replace the windows partition, or to resize it.

If you are installing from CD/DVD, there is a pdf installation document on the first disc:
/docu/en/startup_en.pdf

The exact name and location of the file may differ depending on the version you are installing.
Also, by default SuSE Linux uses "grub" as the boot loader. The computer will boot up using this loader, and there will be a Menu Option to load windows.

Look for your equipment under the Linux HCL on this site. ATI is harder to setup under than NVIDIA. The company doesn't support Linux as well as NVIDIA does. Search this site for the Model of your card. Configuring ATI cards is a fairly common thread on this site.

I couldn't find the "f114p" on the NetGear Web site. However I found an FR114P model. It looks like the router does the NAT translation and includes a DHCP server. If this is the case, then you simply need to select DHCP in the network setup ( in the YaST2 configuration program ) and the DHCP server will dish out the IP information.

Cheers, but I would be able to access data on the Suse drive from within windows or vis versa.

Suse can read and write to Fat32 partitions.

Just make sure you dont use Hibernation in Windows, it screws with stuff when you use linux between windows hibernations.

Windows98 on the other hand can only support fat partitions. XP adds on NTFS and a few others, but no linux filesystem support yet. Possibly MS will get smart with Windows Vista??

You can have a separate fat32 partition dedicated for sharing files between Windows and Linux. You don't want to install linux on a fat32 (vfat) partition however.

Is this just for efficiency, or is there an operational reason?

The fat32 filesystem doesn't contain unix permissions. You can't set the ownership rights. The NTFS filesystem can't be written by linux, but can be read. Having a separate fat32 partition, will allow you to store files in linux, that you want to read in Windows. It is a filesystem that both Linux and Windows can write to.

As of the kernel release from yesterday (2.6.15) NTFS writes are safe. Just FYI.