as a complete newbie y have some basic question. like to switch over and to learn first.
installed latest version of iso disc on pentium 32 bit with win xp. partitioning of 8 gb from disk seemed no problem, all visible after installation. but after restarting there apeared no choice between win and mandriva. windows just started up as usual. please tell how to adjust. thanks.

You must install the boot loader onto the MBR (Master Boot Record) of your primary drive. This is usually the drive that contains the windows partition and is the first boot device. You probably installed it onto he Linux "root" partition, which will not get you anywhere. Put your disk back in, boot to the recovery console (it is a menu option) and install the boot loader to the MBR. Then you will be able to choose which you want to boot.

Welcome to MUB and welcome to Linux!

thanks for your instructions, seemed fairly simple. but... i get no menu option to boot in recovery console. so stared to search a bit and got the boot loader menu. selected the "grub with grafics" and bootdevice: /dev/hda. this seems to be the right spot. but still no result when starting up. when entering again in the boot loader message "no bootloader installed" appears and this returns every time i do the process (tried with all possible presented alternatives). what am i doing wrong. sorry for this silly question, but fiddled around for quiet some time without any results. thanks again for your help!

No questions are silly. When I first started fiddling with Linux, I did not find this sight for many months, and I almost tossed it out of frustration!

Please tell me more abut your hardware. What is the motherboard? What are your devices?

ok, thank you for your patience. i'm sure this will be running one day and hope to be able to eliminate win asap.

here my configuartion:
motherboard: nVidia-nForce (no further type or nr available)
procesor: amd athlon xp
hd maxtor 80 gb
cd/dvd
memory 512 mb
grafics card nvidia gForce 4MX440

hope this is enough info to solve the problem, thanks again!!!!!

Do you have (in XP) installed something like GoBack, or some other utility that alters the MBR?

as far as i know no such program is installed

OK. Can you paste here the file /boot/grub/menu.lst ?

after startup from the life cd found the following after opening computer, filesystem in boot/grub/menu.lst only available with extension "example" (boot/grub/menu.lst.example) , hope this is the correct one. here the content:

timeout 10
color 2
splashimage (hd0,4)/grub/mdv-grub-splash.xpm.gz
default 0
viewport 3 2 77 22
shade 1
title 26 11-8
kernel (hd0,4)/vmlinuz-2.6.11-8mdk root=/dev/hda6 resume=/dev/hda1
initrd (hd0,4)/intrd-2.6.11-8mdk.img

hope this helps you to find the solution, thanks

Thanks. What does your hard drive look like in windows? How many letters show up?

that's an easy one:

got the c (with 20 gb) and d (with 52 gb). should be ok as i choose to take 8 gb for linux when installing mandrivia to the hard disk.

Two things:
1) there should be a menu.lst. The example one is not the running menu list. If it does not exist, there is a problem.

2) My best guess is that your grub entry should be (hd0, 2) everywhere it says (hd0,4) You should make sure that the running file says this. You could edit the example, and rename it. Rememebr to be the ropot user in order to make these edits.

thanks for your tips. there was no menu.lst but as suggested y took the existing example, changed hd0,4 to hd0,2 and saved without the .example extension (even learned how to enter root user). to setup the dualboot i went to controlcenter - boot - setup how system boots and receive a message ' this program exited abnormaly ' . rebooted all again from the cd, new file is stll there but get same message when trying to setup doble boot configuration.
looks like i really need instructions for a absolute novice, sorry and thanks again for your patience.

The above unnecessarily fussy (and probably wrong as well), we certainly don't want to do such a thing.
When booting from the liveCD, your HD root partition is *NOT* mounted for safety reasons. Just mount it by hand (either by harddrake, if you're using some sort of Mandriva liveCD, or gparted/qtparted, or simply change desktop setting so unmounted volumes appear on it, and then ricktclick and mount it.
Can you see now menu.lst under /boot/grub ?
When changing grub settings there's not * normally* something else you should do- but in your case after making any mods to menu.lst you had to chroot to the HD root partition and reinstall grub:

(or whatever device node your boot medium has).
When booted from the liveCD, open a console and type in

What comes up?

i like your approach of doing things as simple as possible. but as a full novice i could find no way to "simply change desktop settings". how do i do that? what is "harddrake"? i run mandriva from the life cd. and i now do have a menu.lst file (different from the one i created earlier)

ok, this was getting to complicated. looks like mandriva is difficult to install on my system. a pitty as i liked it most of all tried distributions that start from a cd. ubunto did it all by itself in about 30 minutes it was running from de hd. will try to learn as much as posible and take a decision about the final distribution later. thanks for all your help.

You could try Knoppix Live CD. ( the best there is in live CD's ). Download it. Burn the iso as image. Knoppix mount all hard drives and partitions on startup. Become root ( user=root, passwd=root ). Navigate your way to the Linux partition and get /boot/grub/menu.lst with 'cat /boot/grub/menu.lst', copy and paste here. you can also do it with editor ( vi, gedit, etc ). Do the same with /etc/fstab and post it here. That way they can help you better.