I am dual booting with win2k. Is there anything else i need to d/w before i install Mandrake 7.2? Drivers ....? How should i partion a 20 gig drive...first 3 mandrake(fat32), 5 gigs win2 (ntfs), ...the rest share.

You should be all set, but let me offer some advice: Windows2000 will only read FAT and NTFS partitions. Linux will mount to just about any partition under the sun. In other words, I'd store any shared data (like MP3's) on a FAT partition readable from each operating system. For partitioning, keep this in mind. Your hard drive can have up to 4 primary partitions. If you need more than 4, then one of these four must be an "extended" partition. The extended partition is then further subdivided into more partitions. MS-DOS, Win95, Win98, NT, and Win2k will ONLY boot from one of the four primary partitions, not from an extended partition. Linux will boot from an extended, so you might as well put it there to avoid using up any of your 4 precious primary partitions. Now, For the linux partitions: I recommend making three: 1) a swap partition. 2) a 24 meg EXT2 partition mounted at /boot. 3) a Reiser partition mounted at / each swap partition should be no larger than 128 megs. (bigger ones are wasted space) If you want 256 megs of swap, use 2 partitions. Linux is very memory friendly, so unless you're running huge applications, and don't have much RAM, I would only use 128 megs. The EXT2 filesystem is the old filesystem used by linux. It's supported by all distributions, including small distributions that fit on a floppy. In other words, use EXT2 for the /boot directory so if you screw something up you can easily correct the problem with a simple emergency floppy disk. The main partition should be a REISER file system. Although EXT2 is already faster than NTFS or FAT, REISER is even faster yet. I've heard twice as fast, although I'm sceptical. REISER is also known as a "journaled" file system, which means it keeps a small record of everything it plans on writing to disk before it actually writes to disk. So if you pull the plug when you're installing something, file system damage is minimal. So there you have it. Now you need to decide how much you want to devote to Reiser and how much to FAT/NTFS. good luck

So i need to fdisk my whole computer and install win2k on D: Then install Linux on c: Do i need to make those swap folders and ext2 boot. Or are they install will i install Linux, instead of me manually installing those partitions with fdisk. What do they do exactly do -"swap" and "ext2". Is there a --singlepartition-- I can make that Linux and Win2k will see and will be able to use? Is "swap" a sortof temp folder? Thxs for all your help - all info is useful that anyone can give me. By the way i have no partitioning software so i get the joy of fdisk.