want to put linux on apartition that all ready have NTworkstation.also have NTserver and win 95 on the other two partitions.each partition is 2 G.B.the win 95 is on the c: wich as the boot pertition.1)-can i reformat only the drive that the NTworkstation seet on it? 2)-well..how do i do it? 3)can i load drivers to the win95 partition and copy them to the linux partition after the installation? 4)-where do i find all the those driver that fit to linux [screen modem printer cdrom ]? 5)-what is the most common distribution(in hope that its got better chances to have acompatible drivers]? 6)is it "garentied" to make the system with lilo amultiboot one ? 7)-can i read and work with data from the win95 and the linux both ways aruond ? 8)-If i knowing linux,does it make me aunix "knower"as well?

1 -- No need to reformat... put your linux installation disk or CD and reboot. Pick the partition that NT workstation is in as where to install linux. It will reformat and make it an ext2 partition before installing linux. 2 -- answer above. 3 -- which drivers are we talking about? windows drivers are windows drivers. you will need linux drivers for your hardware most of which already comes within the linux kernel.If for some odd reason you have linux drivers in your win95 and want to copy them to linux, yeah, you must have fat32 support in kernel and mount your win95 partition. after that you can go there and copy the files in appropriate places on your linux partition. 4 -- drivers are in the kernel. Most drivers are compiled as modules and your installation will be able to load the drivers forever. You need not do anything unless your hardware is not supported and you need third party drivers. There are zillions of resources on the internet to find linux drivers. just search for it at google.com/linux 5 -- Ugh! this is a BAD question... what is your favorite food? Well my choice is RedHat or Mandrake, I played with most other and Mandrake seems to be the most trouble-free one to me. 6 -- Nothing is guaranteed. Linux is free and comes with no tech support. If you screw up, you may lose your data on other partitions and you may also lose your temper..:) But yeah, lilo can boot any OS if set up correctly. 7 -- Look at answer 3. You can not read linux from win95. You can read and write win95 from linux. You can read winnt from linux but writing to winnt from linux is DANGEROUS. 8 -- Mostly. and, what is UNIX? Is is a geberal term for *nix OSes. so Linux is UNIX. (UNIX is the abstract base class) Good Luck!

I'm running WinNT 4.0 Server and Red Hat Linux 6.2 on the same drive. The most critical issue, I think, is to avoid installing LILO on the MBR. After reading through the Red Hat installation guide, I realize that the SAFEST way to install Linux on an existing NT system is to leave ntloader alone and boot Linux from a floppy. The installation guide explicitly says that LILO will write over NT's boot loader and you will be unable to boot NT. Configure LILO so that it is NOT installed on the master boot record. Really, it only takes, what, another 45-60 seconds to boot from a floppy? If you're interested in preserving NT, leave ntloader alone and setup a boot floppy. Of course, this is the conservative approach. If you REALLY don't want to blow away your existing setup, I highly recommend that you check out the following for information on how to properly plan your NT/Linux union: http://metalab.unc.edu/mdw/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader.html I chose the most conservative approach; I use a boot floppy to access my Linux system. They live well together, but Diskeeper 5.0 for NT blew away my Slackware Linux installation a few months ago. So, I'd make sure you do a full backup of your Linux partition before doing an NT defrag. Finally, I picked up Red Hat 6.2, Professional Edition. It comes with excellent documentation, a relatively simple installation process, Gnome, KDE, Apache Web Server, DB2 Server, all of the Linux HOW-TOs, and several other application CDs. Also, you can register for commercial support. I paid around $165 from CompUSA for the professional edition. Scott p.s. The last I heard, Red Hat enjoyed about 70% of the Linux OS marketplace. If you invest in Red Hat, you won't have to worry about sitting on a stale OS anytime soon.

thanks guys .nice ones .

Not true! Believe it or not, you CAN boot linux and NT with LILO. Just make the Linux partition bootable with fdisk and install LILO in the root of the linux partition. (Add your linux parition and dos/NT partition before you install it or you'll be reaching for Mr. Bootdisk again. 8) I have 3 partitions on a 10Gb HD, ~3GB a piece. hda1 = Win98, hda5 = Win2K (extended partition) and hda3 = linux. hda3 is bootable with LILO pointing to hda3/hda1. Win2K installed ntldr and such on hda1 so after typing "dos" at LILO I get the "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional/Windows 98" selection screen. Then there's the long wait before I can load everquest.