I tried installing mandrake 8.1, but it gave me a kernel panic that I didn't wanna deal with. WHen I tried to install 8.0, something else happened. I had partitioned the last 20 gigs of my 60 gig HD for linux. I asked it to "auto-allocate" (I'm a newbie) but it said there was not enough space. Could this be because of the 1024 cylinder thing? If it is, the only way to fix it me thinks is make first part of HD linux. Can windows XP boot after the 1024th cylinder? Any help appreciated, thanks!

Mandrake needs the / partition to be no more than the FIRST 6 gigs of the HD. I use a secondary hd strictly for linux mandrake 8.1, and I have used 8.0 and 7.2 as well. I dual boot with win98se and system commander. You need a max of 6 gigs for the / (root) partition, max of 2.5 gigs for the swap partition, and the rest for the home partition. Total of 3 partitions for linux mandrake 8.x. I have always gotten the powerpack edition. My system: 4 60 gig hds, dvd-rom, cd-rw, tyan mobo w/athlon classic 900 mhz, combo floppy drive and 768 mb ram in 12 bay full tower. vidcard is trident blade3d and sound is sb pci128. Also use promise ultra66 pci controller for those extra hds. No, I don't run a server, hehehe. down and dirty: it is worth getting a 2nd hd just for linux. No headaches like you have that way. Now, dual booting with winXP is a story I can't answer to. Have fun!