I've seen enough of Linux in Virtual PC for me to say that I would like to use it, i'm new to it but it seems a very good O/s - a little slow but i assume this is because it's in a virtual machine so i'd like to see it at full speed. That's the good part, the other part is I still want Windows XP - I don't want to get rid of Windows completely. I know I could use partitions, but I only have my 80GB drive in this system, which is already in 2 partitions and I don't want to mess with it. It leaves one alternative, and that's to use another hard drive, of which I have one spare (6.4GB, plenty of space for Mandrake 10?) but I have a few questions about this. One is, my 80GB is UDMA100, yet the 6.4GB is getting on a bit, I think that's UDMA66 - I don't want to slow my PC down, and the only spare IDE connection left is on the primary channel, along with my 80Gig as the CD-RW/CD-ROM uses the secondary. Would it slow the 80gb down or can these newer PCs get around this? Also, what about booting? I know XP has a boot menu for different OSs but i'm sure i read this isn't compatible with XP. How would I go about it if i use another hard disk for Mandrake? Finally, my hardware - do I need drivers available or are they included in my distribution? My motherboard is a PC Chips M810, with a GeForce4MX440, and a Yamaha SV550 PCI sound card - any compatibility problems known with these? Thanks for any help! Alex

Hi I found out the hard way of "allowing" windows on my linux drive. Sooner or later windows was sure to get in a tangle with its file system and overwrive some space allocated for linux. So I opted for a swap bay for my master primary ide. However you have a machine which in the bios you should be able to choose to boot from the second hard drive (slave) device. I couldn't confirm that you could as the pcchips site is taking its time loading up on mozilla 1.5 tonight. [If you can not select to boot from the slave drive .. then what I'm about to decribe won't apply] The elegance in this is the smaller drive will sit in the xp system (boot from master drive) with little apparent effect. Your larger drive should operate in the same mode as before. No boot menu should be required. To boot ( or install) linux will be a matter of setting the computer to boot from the slave drive in the bios. Entering into the bios setup to select which os to boot may be a longer method to boot up each time, but the main advantage is the XP hard drive will be "safe"

Thanks for the information there. One thing I was wondering, will I be able to access my 80GB drive (NTFS, XP - it has all my documents, files etc on) from within Linux? Then I won't have to copy all my documents to the old 6GB drive just to use them in Linux Thanks again Alex

I messed up! Although I didn't install it on the Windows drive/80GB (i even disabled this drive in standard bios settings) the installer still detected it, and installed a bootloader onto the machine! Not a problem, s I can boot into Windows from the menu, but I would of prefered to of used the method you mentioned above, anenefan. Because 9 times out of 10 i'll be using Windows. Is there any way to get rid of this bootloader, and put it on the Linux drive (6.4GB) so i can boot of that when required like you said? Cheers!

Hi Which hard drive is the bootloader on? The simplest way is to remove the small drive and set to boot from the first hard drive, and see if you get a bootloader. It sounds like you don't have an option to boot from the second drive. Maybe this feature is not as common as I thought. I forget from time to time that products can be regional. I start to get nervous when things don't go as they should. If you can boot xp from the menu - I'd leave it as that. Now you need to backup the mbr / bootloader area (I'm not sure but I think xp's mrb extends after the partition table as well - someone else will know for sure how to back up to safeguard xp.) I'd DD the entire first sector of the hard drive to be sure so that at a latter time you can copy back however much of that file you need. At least linux is on its own drive. That was the main thing. Mounting a drive to read ntfs is not a problem. However writing to a ntfs file system can be done, but generally as a rule, a fat32 partition is created to be a common share partition.

You can quite easily change the default boot option in your boot menu as well as the time waited to make a choice. Why not just make XP the default with something like a 3 second timeout? Do you know if you are using grub or lilo for your boot menu?