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Can someone help me please as I have windows 98 on my C: windows xp on my D: and my E: is full... What i wanna do is put Mandrake linux on my c: but i dont know how to do it without messing up the win xp boot partition... [gloworange]SOMEONE HELP ME PLEASE I HATE WINDOWS 98![/gloworange]
[gloworange]Email me please someone![/gloworange] :)
im having the same troubles.....
You should be able to just load Mandrake and use whatever boot loader it comes with, if the version of Mandrake is new enough, it should auto-config the b/l for you. . .
heres how i did it....when the install screen comes up i pressed F-1 and then typed lnx4win this puts linux in a folder in windows so you dont have to partition, although when i did this it only gave me 300mb so i couldnt get many packages...check out the help file on the cd
Another option, since your drive c: is already used by Windows is to get a program called partition magic, and use that to resize your drive to give you enough space to install with.
I would suggest backing up your files just incase the program does erase something.
I would recomend against the Lnx4Win option, your linux install will only be as fast as the windows OS it's running under, good if you just want to play around w/ it for a while and delete it, but not if you really want to use Linux on a regular basis.
I stand by my original advice, pop in the Mandrake disk, let it walk you through the install and just make sure that you choose your C: slice as the installation's destination. . .the boot loader will recognize your XP slice and should auto-config and when you reboot from the install you should have a boot option for XP and another for Linux. . .if not, it isn't very hard to config the boot loader manually. . .
Though I always advice clean installs to anyone installing linux but if u don't want to load win again, wht u can do is, as advised by cheyenne1212, use partition magic to create a separate partition for u(be sure to defragement ur drive first) adn then load linux on it. thoggh id still advice for a scratch installation. If u r interested, i'm ready to give u exact details. It'd definitely save u a lot of troubles later on.
Bludgeon Said :choose your C: slice as the installation's destination
U can't do that as in that case, ur C: drive will be formatted to ext2 and win xp boot loader will be removed. U have to create a separate partition(or install on some partition other than C) for ur linux to save ur xp boot loader. BTW, in any case i always recommend creting a separate smallish partition for the boot loader instead of installing it on the MBR
Heh, I didn't think about that, you're prolly right I've always kept Windows on my first drive, habit from 3.0, 95/98, I guess.