null Posted February 14, 2005 Report Share Posted February 14, 2005 (edited) my secondary machine, win2k, died on me today. It just won't finish booting. It completes the POST, and says it is loading windows... but 30 minutes later.... still nothing... Once or twice it actually got to the sign on screen, and I did my usual sign on, and it says "Loading your personal settings..." like it always does, but 30 minutes later... still no furthur... Before this happened, today I bought a W-D 160Gb H-D (only $79, what a deal) to install as a 2nd drive in my win2k machine. I was intending to install the newest mdk. So anyway, I installed the drive (as Slave on the primary IDE), my original 40Gb drive is still Master. So I want to install mdk 10.1 OE on the brand new HD. I'll try to fix winblows later. I'm just checking if there are any warnings. I don't really have anything real important on my original drive that has win2k on it. So my question is, since the new drive is unformatted, when I install from the mdk CDs, can I install it to the new drive? I probably want to partition it into 2 drives - say 100Gb as FAT32, and 60 as a linux partition. Should I partition it during the mdk install, or should I fix winblows first, and use Disk Management to partition the 100Gb I want to be FAT32, and then use the mdk install to partition the remaining 60Gb for linux? Finally, if I install mdk while winblows is broken, and then later I re-install win2k, will winblows mess up anything? It shouldn't - since mdk will be on the 160Gb drive, and win2k will be on the original 40Gb drive.... edit: I just read the Dual Boot How-to in Tips & Tricks written by Static. After reading that, it doesn't look like there will be any problems... especially with 2 drives. Edited February 14, 2005 by null Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devries Posted February 14, 2005 Report Share Posted February 14, 2005 Installing Windows after Mandrake will probably cause problems. Install Windows first. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
null Posted February 14, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 14, 2005 Win2k is already installed but not booting. I got the 2nd HD to install linux on. I am hoping that the win2k booting problem can be fixed without reinstall. Anyway, guess I will figure out what's wrong with winblows (ha ha - here come the jokes...) and re-install if I have to, and THEN install linux. Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polemicz Posted February 14, 2005 Report Share Posted February 14, 2005 You should have no problems at all. I have also, when I dual-booted, re-installed Win2000 and it did not mess up my system. As an aside are you sure you don't have a hardware problem? as you probably know linux is much less forgiving of these than Windows. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
null Posted February 15, 2005 Author Report Share Posted February 15, 2005 I suppose it could be a hardware problem. However, it does complete POST (very slow though). For quite a while now (several months) it has taken about 10 minutes for a "cold" startup, but only a couple minutes for a warm boot. So maybe it has been a problem that has progressively gotten worse. I've been browsing around this board reading mdk 10 threads, and I'm getting cold feet about trying out mdk. Alot of posts are complaining about Firefox not opening from email links, Konq opening when people don't want it to, and various installation problems. Firefox & thunderbird work great on my FC2 machine, Firefox is the only browser that ever opens up on my machine. From what I've read in various reviews, mdk 10 is supposed to be the easiest distro in terms of administration... hard to see that from browsing this board, though. Course it makes sense that, since this is a mandrake board, most complaints will be about mandrake... If I buy a mdk 10.1 powerpack dvd (to support mandrake) can I install what I want all from the dvd (stuff like firefox, thunderbird, eclipse)? I getting tired of "doing the yum" (yum is broken on my fc2 box now, and I didn't even do anything to it). I just want to stick a dvd in the drive, and pick what I want... (and that reminds me - I'm tired of making things work - like music & video while browsing the web (installing mplayer plugins, etc), fixing mp3 listening problems (xmms plugin), blah blah. Does this stuff work out of the box with mdk...? sorry to get a little off on this post, but at least it is somewhat related, since the original post references "installing mdk" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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