Guest hotburner2001 Posted September 20, 2004 Report Share Posted September 20, 2004 Hello all, I'm a newbie to this forum, and I've been itching to switch to Linux for a while now. I have read many topics where people complained they couldn't boot Windoze...Or boot anything after installing 10.0 (I guess 10.1 solves the problem? But I don't want to wait months until the "public" release). I have tried to get smart before writing the topic but I'm still unsure of how/if I can avoid this problem: I have 2 hard drives, one of which I have reserved entirely for Mandrake. SO when I come to the partitioning point, I guess, following aRTee's excellent "walkthrough", I will be able to create my directories on that hard drive alone and leave my other (windows) hd untouched. BUT: What about the boot issue? When the invit comes asking me where I want to put it, do I chose MBR? Will that create a boot on MDK's hd? And if so does that mean I have to change which hd boots to eiher get to windows or mdk? How do I do it? as you see this is still a haze :- ) I hope I don't sound too dumb and I've done the best trying to absorb all the "litterature" out there before asking...the only thing I still haven't done yet is try and install...Help me take the dive! Cheers, Jo (in France) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted September 20, 2004 Report Share Posted September 20, 2004 (edited) Just make sure your HDs are set to lba and not auto in your BIOS before doing this. If your Windows drive is the boot drive (master), then tell it to put the bootloader on the MBR on hda. If somehow, you can't boot your computer afterwards, put in a Windows startup floppy and run fdisk /mbr or boot to a WinXP/Win2K cd, whichever you use and choose 'Rescue system using the console' and type fixmbr (may be fixboot or fdisk /mbr). Edited September 20, 2004 by Steve Scrimpshire Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ac_dispatcher Posted September 20, 2004 Report Share Posted September 20, 2004 If its any help I have installed many distros including Mandrake with no problems in dual booting. Give it a try :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest hotburner2001 Posted September 20, 2004 Report Share Posted September 20, 2004 Hi guys, thanks a lot for your replies. So it is correct that the MBR is unique, in that it HAS to be on hda, if that's where windows is. Just thought it could somehow be kept separate but I get it now. I'll give it a try later tonight and come cry to you guys if it ain't working...I backed up 100 gigas worth of stuff, just in case... :- ) I did get to a halt the first time I ever booted from CD1 (the CDs were error-free, did all the checks): it stopped at the first invit but wouldn't bulge after that...Somebody advised to type in CODE linux expert. Something with USB recognition that has maybe been fixed in 10.1. Anyway hope it works I'll be back! Thanks again for your replies. Jo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted September 22, 2004 Report Share Posted September 22, 2004 Just some more info (don't worry if this is over your head, if you don't care to know or whatever, I just want to correct something) : every harddisk has an MBR. It is on the very beginning of the drive, before the first partition starts. You could, if your BIOS allows to select from which harddisk to boot, have a second harddrive where you put lilo or grub (or whatever bootloader) into the MBR (/dev/hdb) and leave the first HD completely untouched. I don't think that standard installations will get you this, so you'd have to install the bootloader on a floppy, then later change the /dev/fd0 in /etc/lilo.conf to /dev/hdb.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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