Dual Booting with W98

[linux_brat]

I need serious help installing Mandrake 7.1 with already installed w98 on my machine.I had dual booted Mandrake with W98 about 2 months ago using Partition Magic that came with Mandrake but within a month I lost my hard drive, courtesy of Partition Magic now I am really not willing to install PT magic to dual boot my machine and I was wondering if someone can help me with partitioning my 40 GB HDD ,so I can get my Mandrake back. I really miss playing with it.Thanx :confused:

[Tyr-7BE]

Is your linux partition still there? What do you mean when you say that you lost your hard drive? Was it just formatted? If the partition is still there, then you can just plunk Mandy back on top using your old partitions (right in time for Beta 8 III :)). If your windows partition takes up the entire drive, there are ways to partition without Partition magic. There's a partitioning NHF and tonnes of documentation on the issue so I won't rehash anything. If your Windows partition isn't taking up all of the drive, but your linux partitions are gone, then Mandy has DiskDrake...a graphical partitioner that you can use to create new partitions out of free drive space. It gives you an option to start it up during the install. Hope this helped a bit.

[linux_brat]

Originally posted by Tyr-7BE:
Is your linux partition still there? What do you mean when you say that you lost your hard drive? Was it just formatted? If the partition is still there, then you can just plunk Mandy back on top using your old partitions (right in time for Beta 8 III :)). If your windows partition takes up the entire drive, there are ways to partition without Partition magic. There's a partitioning NHF and tonnes of documentation on the issue so I won't rehash anything. If your Windows partition isn't taking up all of the drive, but your linux partitions are gone, then Mandy has DiskDrake...a graphical partitioner that you can use to create new partitions out of free drive space. It gives you an option to start it up during the install. Hope this helped a bit.

My old hard drive developed bad sectors and I lost all data on it.Right now my HDD has 2 FAT partitons of 20 and 18 GB each. Can I use disk drake to take space from windows or I have to reformat and fdisk and create free space?

[linux_brat]

My old hard drive developed bad sectors and I lost all data on it.Right now my new HDD has 2 FAT partitons of 20 and 18 GB each. Can I use disk drake to take space from windows or I have to reformat and fdisk and create free space?

[bdg1983]

There are free partitioning tools available at freshmeat.net you can use to resize your fat16 partitions and then create ext2's.

I doubt that Partition Magic destroyed your old drive. Something could have been corrupted, but it's usually fixable.

I always use PM for all my partitioning and BootMagic for booting. I don't bother installing PM anymore as I just use the Rescue Disks that you can create. Works exactly the same as the full install, but without having to actually install the software.

[Lorithar]

lb -
To resize a fat partition and remake it you need some specialized utility ... be it PM or something along those lines.

One predicate you will need for linux on this box to dual boot will be a distro with either grub or the newest lilo (grin Slack 7.1 ships with the newer lilo which gets around the 1024 cyl limit ... so do others) .. the fact that the disk is split the way it is now then becomes moot.