DOA Posted December 20, 2002 Report Share Posted December 20, 2002 I'm building a new system soon and plan to dual-boot WinXP with Mandrake 9.0. How should I go about doing this? Should I partition the drive, install WinXP, then install Linux? Does Linux need to be installed on the first 8GB of the hard drive too? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramfree17 Posted December 20, 2002 Report Share Posted December 20, 2002 if you are going to go from scratch then it would better to partition only the space to be used by windows, install it, and leave the rest to mandrake to detect and partition the rest of the space on its own. and linux can live anywhere in the harddrive that you want it to live in. its not a spoiled brat. ;-) ciao! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuzzylizard Posted December 20, 2002 Report Share Posted December 20, 2002 Should I partition the drive, install WinXP, then install Linux? Does Linux need to be installed on the first 8GB of the hard drive too? Yep, install XP first, creating a partition just for it, and then install Linux. One thing to be aware of though. XP may default to using the NTFS filesystem. Linux does not properly support NTFS. Therefore, if you want to share files between the two OSs, you will need to either install XP with an FAT32 filesystem or create a FAT32 partition to use for sharing files. Note: Mandrake 9.0 can apparantly work with NTFS, however, until the vast majority of people say otherwise, I would avoid using this feature. Linux has been known to mangle ntfs partitions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted December 20, 2002 Report Share Posted December 20, 2002 I think the most important recommendation is to purchase another drive and use that to mess around with linux. It's all too easy to snafu your partition table trying to put both OS's on the same drive. Especially if you don't know what you are doing. I'm not saying its impossible or even hard, but unless you got a good backup, its easier and safer to simply shell for a second used or new drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wessellj Posted December 21, 2002 Report Share Posted December 21, 2002 Two drives is the best and easiest method. Before I bought a second drive, however, I partitioned a 20gb drive pretty much down the middle, installed XP on the first partition, then MDK9 on the second. If you don't plan to access anything from the XP partition with Linux, then use NTFS. Although MDK9 is supposed to be able to access NTFS, I'm having troubles getting it to work - though that's probably because I'm just learning. :shock: You should have little trouble unless you have hardware that's old or non-standard. Good luck! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ral Posted December 21, 2002 Report Share Posted December 21, 2002 What I would do for dual boot on a single HD is to partition the HD into two: Partition 1: NTFS Partition 2: FAT32 (put Mandrake Linux here), it will leave at least 512MB of space which you can use for files to be shared with both WinXP/ML. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pinecone Posted December 31, 2002 Report Share Posted December 31, 2002 I just installed mine. I gave winxp the first half of the 20Gig drive in NTFS. Then i installed mandrake 9 on the second half, and i have no problems, i can access the ntfs drive, but i cant change anything on it. it is read only. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted December 31, 2002 Report Share Posted December 31, 2002 Best to leave it read-only also. How did you do the Mandrake Install? In expert mode or just the default mode? How many linux partitions do you have? Do you have any extended partitions and if so, what kind are they? Linux extended or windows extended? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Counterspy Posted December 31, 2002 Report Share Posted December 31, 2002 To clarify a point in an earlier post possibly subject to misinterpretation, Mandrake does not need to be in the first 8 Gb. of your drive if you set LBA in the BIOS. Counterspy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest pinecone Posted January 5, 2003 Report Share Posted January 5, 2003 I did standard install. Since the NT partition was already made, I just did the thing where the installer automatically partitions the space it has. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted January 5, 2003 Report Share Posted January 5, 2003 Ok, I was wondering whether the automatic partitioner makes the remaining space an extended partition as per linux's definition of extended or windows... I don't know how to check after the fact though. The difference is that windows doesn't mess up the partition table when it encounters its own definition of an extended partition vs linuxs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted January 5, 2003 Report Share Posted January 5, 2003 Linux installation tools partition and format with linux utilities and, accordingly, the resulting extended partition will be a linux one. The formatted linux partitions will be invisible to windows and should cause no problems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest mysecretshame Posted January 7, 2003 Report Share Posted January 7, 2003 I've been reading this forum this evening and found this thread in particular very useful. I have a Sony laptop running XP which I want to install Mandrake 9.0 on when my discs arrive (hopefully tomorrow). The laptop was set up with two 15GB NTFS partitions. In XP I cleared out the second partition and then reformatted it as a FAT32 partition. I intend to do a standard install, being virtually a complete Linux newbie. Am I right in thinking that Mandrake will be able to work with this partition, or should I actually delete the partition entirely and leave Mandrake to find the free space on the disk? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted January 7, 2003 Report Share Posted January 7, 2003 Am I right in thinking that Mandrake will be able to work with this partition, or should I actually delete the partition entirely and leave Mandrake to find the free space on the disk? the mandrake install will recognize it right, and you can use mandrake to clear out the second partition and set it up/reformat it the way it needs it. just make sure you don't have anything on that drive. but...it may be better, for windows, if you just delete the partition. otherwise windows may complain, ya never know. also, it will make the process of partitioning things out for linux a lot easier when you get into the mandrake install-you can just tell it to use the empty space, and you won't have to guess which one is the one you want :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest adamsjw2 Posted January 8, 2003 Report Share Posted January 8, 2003 FWIW, I installed Win2k Server a few months ago. I formated a 2 gig NTFS paritition, in expectation of loading Linux. A few nights ago I installed Mandrake 9.0 on the remainder of the drive. I let the install wizard take care or the partitioning for Mandrake and it went without a hitch. ....if I could only get my damn modem working so easiliy! Jim Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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