dual boot setup with win_me

[linusiaint]

can anyone advise how to setup my partitions to install mandrake 8.0 and be able to choose win_me or man-8.0 at boot up? i tried once but could not boot windows. screen was black and choices along top were:

linux failsafe windows floppy

my box made a series (about 5) of beeps/clicks when windows was chosen and then froze up. i think maybe it was successful but i needed to do something in the boot record of the C:
i am not sure how to set my partitions for a successful setup. should i have two for windows eg C: and D:? And two for mandrake? root and swap. can anyone advise what might need to be done to ensure dual boot setup?
i use a celeron 700/20gig hdd/128mg ram. will gladly supply more info if needed. i am a fairly young grasshopper. thanks

[cameron]

use fdisk from the windows cd and don't make the first partition the whole size (if you are going to use each about 50% of the time, make two 10 gig partitions), then format the first one, and install winme on it. then reboot from the mdk8 cd and let it auto partition the second set (so you'll now have more than two partitions, the first being windows, the second set being linux) then just follow the instructions...it is really simple as long as you a) make two partitions to begin with and b) install winme FIRST so that linux will control boot

[bdg1983]

With a 20GB drive, I would do the following for dualbooting Linux and ME.

5GB Primary Partition fat32 for WinME
15GB Extended Partition with the following Logical Partitions
8GB Logical ext2 partition for Linux
128MB Logical swap partition for Linux
6.?GB Logical fat32 partition for WinME Apps and Data

Of course there are may ways to partition your drive for dualboot and my suggestion is what I would do. I like to have a separate Apps/Data partition for Windows. You can also further divide Linux into other mountpoints/partitions such as /var and /home, but for a beginner, I would suggest starting out with '/' (main Linux partition) and swap.

Install WinME first and then Linux. The Linux bootloader install should detect the Windows partition and set it up to allow dualboot.

Let us know if we can give you any further assistance.