installing on former XP slave drive [solved]

[suomynona]

I'm a n00b about to install Mandriva 2005 LE from DVD, but I want to ask some questions now so I'm not crying and pulling my hair out later when everything goes horribly wrong.

 

 

My intended setup is:

 

1) I have XP on my master WD 80GB hard drive in the first partition (of 2 paritions).

 

2) I want to put Mandriva on the first partition of my slave WD 60GB drive. There are 3 partitions on it right now: The first one is empty and the next two are NTFS formatted and have stuff on them (that I really should back up before doing anything drastic :D ).

 

3) My computer is a 2.8GHz P4 with 512mb of RAM, an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, and onboard sound on an ASUS P4P800 SE motherboard. Also, I have a linksys wireless network card (WMP54G) but could also use the onboard wired LAN on the motherboard if need be.

 

 

Questions:

 

1) Will there be problems if i put mandriva on a slave HD?

 

2) The slave drive used to be the master drive and had XP on it. I simply deleted the windows partition that used to be on it using the XP disk management tool and switched the jumper to slave. Do i need to / should I erase or clear or whatever the MBR on that drive before installing mandriva? I forget if I made the partitions using the XP disk management tool, patition magic 7 (ages ago), partition magic 8 (relatively recently), or even an XP CD during installation, or some combination thereof (if any of that matters in the slightest).

 

3) Given my hardware,

-- a) any suggestions for swap drive size, etc?

-- b ) will I need to scrounge the net to find drivers for anything important? When i tried mandrake 7, my sound and internet didn't work, and when i tried 8, my sound and internet worked, but my video didn't. Hence my continued n00b-ness. And my hardware hadn't even changed between 7 and 8! : / .

-- c) will the wireless card work fine right away, or should I have the network cable ready?

 

4) Which bootloader is less likely to give me headaches :D ?

 

Thanks!

Michael

Edited May 19, 2005 by suomynona

[devries]

1: no, just read the install instruction carefully.

 

2: no

 

3: Swap should be same as RAM (though larger then 512MB is not neccesary) / should be about 6GB and /home as big as you want)

b: not likely. Most hardware is supported in Linux.

c: I would say yes but there is no harm in having the network card ready :)

 

4: just follow the mandrake defaults (lilo)

[suomynona]

great, thanks : ) paranoia abated.