I know this sounds stupid, but I was running XP home (upgrade) and Mandrake 8.1 as a dual boot on one (1) 40 GB HD. Worked like a charm. I wiped it all and installed XP Pro...worked great. Tried to install Mandrake 8.2 and ended up having to reformat. I didn't realize that Linux and XP had so many problems. I just ordered another hard drive (20 GB) and am going to run Mandrake 8.2 on that drive and keep the XP Pro on the other as the master...I've never run 2 drives; not to mention the two different OS. Anything I should know? I want to partition the second drive as 75% ext2 and 25% as fat32 as a share between both...is this possible? Can someone out there give me an outline as to how to tackle this? I've read many posts about booting problems following installations of Linux and XP...I'm am quite nervous... Please help! Email with instructions would be great! pturzanski@hotmail.com

Hi, Contrary to u're expectations, this installation should really be very simple. I assume here that you either intend to install a fresh copy of WinXP Pro on the 40 gig drive or have done that already, and are waiting for a second drive to arrive. So assuming that u've setup the second drive in your system and all's well with it from a hardware point of view, here's what u can do: 1) If u haven't installed WXP Pro yet, then do that first. Don't allow it to touch the second drive yet. 2) Pop in u're mdk 8.2 cd and allow it to boot up. Start up the installation and choose 'expert' install. 3) here I'm assuming that u know about partitioning harddrives. If u have a problem with that this page should help: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/doc/82/en/user.html/disks.html 4) The simplest thing would be to choose one large partition (Say about 14.5 GB) and mount it as '/' 5) then create a swap partition of about say 512 MB 6) Then create a windows Partition (FAT32) for the remaining diskspace (5GB). If u want to use this as common diskspace between windows and linux, u can define a mount point here for this partition. (/mnt/windows for example). So this drive will be accessible to u in both systems. (As /mnt/windows in linux and X: in windows where X is the next avlbl drive letter). 7) continue with the install as usual. The next time you boot into Windows, it should automatically detect and install u're new 5GB Windows partition as a new drive and it should show up in 'My Computer'. 8) After u're mdk install, when u boot up it should come up wih a menu asking u if u want linux or NT. U can now select which system u want to boot into. I do hope this helped. Partitioning drives is no big deal really and there's plenty of documentation on the web on how to do that. In fact I just found a step by step pictorial demo install on the mandrake site. Between the instructions here and this demo, u should be fine :-) http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/demos/Demo/Mandrake8.1/Install/Expert/ Good Luck Kannan

Have similar problem. XPpro on drive C and Linux Mandrake 8.2 on D. Loading Linux comes up with chaotical screen from which I can only exit brute force. I can find no way of deleting and reloading Linux even through BIOS setup. "My Computer" in XP no longer recognizes drive D which I will need. I am a newbie.