Making a Dual Boot System

[protagonist]

My goal is to create a dual boot system with Windows 98 and Linux both on the same hard drive. So far I have 98 loaded and using partition Magic 5.0 have created a linux partition on the hard disk. Can someone tell me if I am going in the right direction and if so, where I should go from here?

[Choozo]

Yup, you are on the right track :)

But, instead of copying what the NHF's here are saying, why don't you have a look at that one first? http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/installation/partition/multi_partition.html

Cheers :)

[j.harrison]

If you boot from The Mandrake 8.0 CD, DrakX will take it from there. When it detects your partitions, just tell it which one to load Drake on. It's all pretty self explanatory with Drake. Easy install, friendly GUI, nice to newbies.

[retretret]

Just make sure that when you in partition magic you make a boot partition or the root partition below the 1024 cylinder (it is the second little line on the bar graph. I can't tell you how many frustrated reformats I had before I heard about that rule. This of course applies if you are using LILO but that is probably what you are going to use.

[ThePyr0x]

yeah mandrake will make it all easy for ya

[protagonist]

I went to the mandrake web site and when I tried to download from some of the ftp mirror sites, it just stalled and did nothing. is there some kind of sequence or something I have to follow when I download from a ftp site?

[bdg1983]

Just download the inst.iso and if you want the extras, the ext.iso. I think that is correct or close it it as I don't use Mandrake, but remember some of the other posts about the iso images.

[Choozo]

Originally posted by retretret:
<STRONG>Just make sure that when you in partition magic you make a boot partition or the root partition below the 1024 cylinder </STRONG>

That only applies to older versions of LILO. The one used in Mandrake 7.1 and up, RedHat 7.0 and up, (a lot more distros I'm sure) should be OK with the /boot partition above the 1024 cylinder.

Cheers :)

[lilrabbit129]

Nope, RH 7.1 still has a problem with the 1024 cylander limit. The only way to get around it is if you have another distro create the partitions then let RH "take over" the already created ones. For some reason this satisfies RH. Go figure.

But i'm convinced that LILO will never work with my system (something about the bios...keep getting the 10101010 error).

[Crewchief]

Drake 8.0 will work just fine. I have a 30gb drive and drake is loaded at the very end of the drive. IT WORKS FINE! BTW I used partition magic as well. When setting up PM make sure that you tell it its a ext2 partition. On the install just select default on the drive... It'll find the correct drive and install it there without blowing away windows. One other thing if you've install linux before on this system blow it away in PM cause it will cause nothing but problems on the install.