Hello- I am currently running Win ME and would like to set up a dual boot with Mandrake Linux 8.1. I am not sure how to set up the disk partition. I have a 40 GB hard drive with a single partition (about 10 GB used for ME programs and documents, etc). While I just backed up all my important stuff, I don't want to do more work (reloading apps, etc in ME) than I need to because i screwed something up setting the partitions. Any help and suggestions for partition size would be appreciated! Thanks!

I had the same setup going. I grabbed a copy of Partitian Magic and setup a 6 gig(you might want more) partition for linux. Out of that partition I created a swap and boot partition. The swap was 256mb (2xamount of ram) and the boot was rather small, 35 or 55mb I think. I was using Redhat 7.1 I was able to get LILO to work with ME just fine. If you already have an empty partition and don't need to repartition then you should be good to go. You'll just need a primary linux partiton where linux will be saved and then a swap partition and possibly a boot partition(might not need one). I'm not too familiar with the Mandrake setup program, but I know its a lot more user friendly than Redhat. Best thing you could do, at least I think so, is to just throw the CD in and go through the setup process to get to the partitoning setup and see what it recommends there, if anything. It won't commit changes unless you tell it to.

yeah, it all depends on how many partitions you currently have. anyway, it'd be nice to defragment your disk, and make it smaller (10 g woulbe be kewl) and then make yourself another one (how about another 10 gig?). you then do your swap partitions 2*ram as explained above. and the rest? it'd be a nice hda4, use all of your free space. when you instal linux, choose the second 10 gig as your native linux partition (i think it's 83...) and your swap as swap (i think it's 82) don't touch your hda1, and the hda4? you could format your hda4 as vfat, why? because both linux and windows can read vfat, so you could use it to store documents of both linux and windows. just while setting upo your mandrake, put the mount points for both your windowsme partition, and your vfat-for-both-linux-and-windows partition. how about /drivec for the 10 gig winme and /drived for the all free space left vfat that'd be nice s hit, id' love to have 40 gigs for me i run a dual boot of win98 and RH with 6 gigs... anyway, if you allow me to give yoru some advice: don't use WinME, it suckz, it's the worse windows you could have chosen, worse than Win95. go get win2000!!! it's probably the least s---ty version of linux. if you need further help icq 55920078 mail humbertocueva@yahoo.com