I had the new distro of Mandrake 9.2 and decided to install it on a spare HDD I have.

The HDD is slaved to my Windows HDD it runs WinMe.

When I went to install the distro, I tried to do it in windows to the spare drive, but it would not restart so I created a floppy boot disk and installed it that way to my D drive, but during the setting up prior to install it refered to deleting my "C" drive,(that was not an option) so I stopped the install and disconnected my "C" drive, and proceeded with the install, it went in very easily far easier than windows, usually I get problems with my printer and graphics card.

I was very inpressed with the speed on the internet, having had a tater of what it can do I want to use it regularly and learn as much as I can, the problem is when I reconnected my "C" drive with windows on it, it just booted straight into windows without an option to load Lynux.

Please using the KISS meathod

Keep
It.
Stupid
Simple

Can some one tell me in detail what I have to do to get it to get a dual boot, without loosing all my windows data preferably leaving the setup the way it is.

Thanks

Normally what I would do is use Partition Magic to cut out a chunk for linux. 4 or 5 gigs is all I would use normally.

I know Redhat is very good about detecting Windows partions and it will make it very clear to you which partition contains what. SuSe was not nearly as kind to me as Redhat was.

I have no experience with Mandrake, but I'm assuming it should be fairly straight forward.

LILO is your answer.

It stands for LInux LOader.

It will boot both linux and windows.

There are other options as well, like grub, and chos, and a whole host of other options as well. If you are curious, a search for "boot loader" (quotes included) on google will give you alot of options.

If you boot into linux and look in /usr/share/lilo there will be several sample config files and some other docs about lilo. One of the samples will have in it the commands that you need to boot windows as well. The issue here though, will be that it would need to go into the master boot record in order to come up on boot.

As others have said, Linux has it's own choices of bootloaders to allow you to boot multiple operating systems; the 2 most popular loaders being lilo (LInux LOader) and Grub (GRand Unified Bootloader). What has happened in your case is that because you disconnected your Win drive while installing Linux, the install program couldn't detect the drive, and therefore couldn't set up whichever bootloader it was installing to enable booting both OSes.

The reason that the system still boots directly into Windows is that the Windows bootloader information still resides in the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your Primary Master Drive ("C:" in Windows terminology, "hda" in Linux). Had you left the Windows drive attached when you installed Linux, the installer would have detected the Win install, configured its bootloader for both OSes, and written the information necessary to dual-boot into the MBR. You probably could have worked around the message alluding to deleting "C:", but as a Newbie I don't blame you for playing it safe.

Since you have a boot disk (and the install CDs) , you can try booting into Linux that way and reconfiguring your bootloader, but there might be a problem with that: because the drive on which you installed Linux was the only drive in the system at the time, Linux probably identified it as hda (Primary Master) and built its config files around that assumption. Now that the drive is back at its original hdb (Primary Slave) position, all of you drive and partition pointers are going to be out of sync.

I'd suggest 2 things:

1. Reinstall Linux, with the Windows drive still connected. If/when you get the message concerning deleting the C: drive's contents, write down exactly what the message is and where in the process it occurs. Back out of the installation and post that info here. Also let us know what type of installation you are performing; most distros give you a few choices such as "standard", "workstation", "server", "custom", and "expert". Since you already have another OS on your system, if you're just doing a standard/workstation type of install, you might need to use one of other methods so that you can have better control over how the installer deals with the mutiple drive/partition/operating system situation.

2. You can try to "rescue" your current installation, but I'll bet the bootloader configuration isn't all you'll have to rectify, and some or all of the work may have to be done from the command line. Walking you through that would be difficult if you're new to Linux/UNIX systems. If you want to try, let us know.

i also will recommend you leave both drives connected and pop in the linux install cd and reboot and when the isntallation begins for mandrake it will reconize the openspace/linux partitions you created earlier, and will also reconize that windows is installed and when it asks where to put the boot loader(i believe mandrake comes with grub) say you want it in the MBR(master boot record) of your windows harddrive. this will make when that hd boots up to ask you what os you want to boot into. and this should work jst fine for you. hope this helps.

Hi,

for dual boot systems running Win and Linux I just modify boot.ini.
I copy the boot sector of the second hard disk (where my linux is installed) into a file hdb.b via the Linux dd utility and place it on C:

My boot.ini looks then as follows:


[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=C:\hdb.b
[operating systems]
C:\hdb.b="hdb.b:lilo, hdb2: debian Linux 2.4.24"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows"

Kind regards,
gw3

That's an excellent suggestion if you're running WinNT/2k/XP, but the poster is running a Windows ME system.

Aside from setting active partitions or changing BIOS boot sequence settings, a boot loader like lilo, grub, or XOSL would be your only option to dual boot ME and any other OS.

Thanks for this hint. Indeed, I tried this method with WinNT 4.0 and Win2000.

gw3