Dual booting on a slave drive.

[Atropal]

Hello, I hate to register and immediately ask a question but I used the search function and have read a number of articles on the subject and couldn't find exactly what I was concern/curious about.
I recently ordered an 80gb hard drive to add as a slave drive to give myself a little more room.
I currently have a 20gb with windows 2000 professional install on and have been curious about Linux for awhile (a friend gave me some red hat discs awhile back and they have just been collecting dust) but just haven't had the room to mess with it, but with the coming of this new drive I would like to dual boot Linux (Mandrake sounds nice, at this point.)
What Id like to do is set aside about 10gb on a partition for Linux on the slave drive, 5gb for windows misc files (temp, swap, etc) and leave the rest as a NTFS partition for game and media storage. I have been looking for a step by step guide for partitioning off a section of the slave drive for Linux and setting up the rest as NTFS on a system that already has Win 2k (of course not quite that specific, but thats my intent) and most of the articles I have read are either setting a native Linux file system on the entire slave drive or formatting a drive and partition it off for windows and Linux. Id just would just drop into the install and sort of wing it (using articles and such when required) but the thought of disk druid gobbling up my shiny new hard drive and not being able to access it with my primary OS is a disturbing one. Any advice or articles on the subject would be helpful.
My system is:
Asus a7v8x-x motherboard running an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (barton core)
ATI Radeon 9700 pro 128mb video
Sam sung 308b (I believe) CD-RW/DVD combo drive
20gb maxtor 7200rpm IDE master drive
80gb WD 7200 IDE slave drive (unpartitioned, unformatted at the moment)
512mb DDR pc2100 kingston value ram.
onboard sound/lan, if that helps.
Thank you for reading, regardless of whether you reply or not. And sorry to post.

[Parcival]

This is what I would do in your situation:

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Install your slave drive in your Windows box.
Boot Windows.
In the System Settings, use the disk tool to format as much of your new slave as a NTFS partition.
Boot a Linux LiveCD or a selfmade bootdisk with fdisk. Create the necessary Linux partitions in the remaining space of your slave. (This can probably also be done in the Mandrake installer, you just gotta point it to using the free space)
Make sure that the bootloader is being installed according to your wishes. If you feel unsecure, write it onto a floppy first so it leaves your Master untouched. However, I suggest you write it into the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your Master.
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For more information on your issues, search for fdisk and GRUB.

[Atropal]

Ok, so just to windows and fdisk the drive like normal but leave the 10gb free for linux, then restart boot from CD and use disk druid or what have you to partition that last 10gb as a native linux install? (and then all the screwing around with grub or lilo)
Thank you for your reply, by the way.

[Sgood1971]

Originally posted by Atropal
Ok, so just to windows and fdisk the drive like normal but leave the 10gb free for linux, then restart boot from CD and use disk druid or what have you to partition that last 10gb as a native linux install? (and then all the screwing around with grub or lilo)
Thank you for your reply, by the way.

There shouldn't be any screwing around with grub or lilo, it should recognize that you have Win and Nix installed and configure itself.

[Atropal]

OK, thank you.
Hadn't gotten around to reading any manuals for grub/lilo, yet.

[Parcival]

Originally posted by Atropal
Ok, so just to windows and fdisk the drive like normal but leave the 10gb free for linux, then restart boot from CD and use disk druid or what have you to partition that last 10gb as a native linux install? (and then all the screwing around with grub or lilo)
Thank you for your reply, by the way.

Yes, exactly. However, please notice that when I was saying fdisk I meant the Linux fdisk program and not the one that comes with your DOS bootdisk. In other words, use the DOS fdisk to create your Windows partitions, but use the Linux fdisk to create your Linux partitions.
Once you have created your Linux partitions you must format them by punching the proper command for the filesystem of your choice into the command line. However, since you are going to install Mandrake, the Mandrake installer will both do the partitioning and the formating for you, really easy. All you need to do is to point it in the setup screen to the (yet) unpartitioned space behind your Windows partitions.

Likewise you proceed with your bootloader, Mandrake probably will do all the heavy duty work for you. However, it's probably going to ask you where you wanna have the bootloader installed, so you'll probably have to say in the setup screen where you want it to be in. I recommend using the MBR of your Master drive as this probably is the drive you set the bootflag as "active".