hi guys im new on here and wanna say hi firstly. so hi.

secondly ha!

iv got xp on my master drive and want to install mandriva mandrake on my slave and want a boot menu on start up to choose between the two.

any help?

thanks guys.

o/c

Hi and Welcome to PCHF
Firstly if you install Mandriva on your secondary HDD and install GRUB the boot loader it should display a menu at boot up. If not set the HDD as bootable in partition set up in manuall partioner during installation (Note: Havnt tried this with Mandriva yet)

Hope this helps

Hi
A few instructions on ow to create a dual boot system:
1/ Insert and boot from Live CD
2/ Once logged in click install icon
3/ Click next and select time zone and next and select language
4/ Once at partitioning options select Manual
5/ Select the partiton you wish to resize and click resize
6/ Once resized as nesacery click it and select create
7/ Set it as a Primary Partition and size it as 768MB and format as SWAP
8/ Wth remaining free space do the same as instructions 6 and 7 but have itformatted as Ext3 and make Bootable.
9/ Click next an fill out user account details
10/ it will show a summar of the installation and click install.

Hey..
There can b problems at times with a dual boot when the Linux OS is installed in a secondary hard drive. though i had this problem with fedora. id installed fedora on my secondary drive and then i cudnt boot into windows. only wen i set da bios boot options as 1st my primary and 2nd da secondary drive was i able 2 boot in2 windows but den i cant boot in2 linux as that option dusnt come.
so as of now...i keep changin boot options in bios 2 boot in2 da necessary OS.
Dnt no if u ll hav this problem with mandrake..

That was an install mistake.

From the step by step instructions above, add:

-1 Backup your windows main drive partition before you do anything else.
Probably C: on your first HD.
1. Use a windows package (Acronis has a nice package named Disk Director)to resize your windows partition to leave 125Meg at the beginning of the primary drive.
2. Now run through the install and when you get to partitioning, select manual mode.
3. Create /boot in the 125 Meg space you recovered from Windows and install grub in this partition.
4. Put the rest of your Linux partitions anyplace you want. Second HD, empty space on the primary, wherever. Does not matter to Linux as long as the /boot partition is marked as a primary partition and is on the primary drive.
5. When you get to where to update for the boot, choose the MBR on the primary drive.
6. Edit the grub options to change the item labeled 'Other OS' to Windows and then pick the one you want to be the default boot OS. Either Windows or Linux.
7. Finish installing Linux and reboot when it tells you to.
8. Hit the space bar if it installed the boot menu in hidden mode. This is the default on Fedora and they only give you 5 seconds before it take the default OS for the boot.
9. First time you login to your Linux OS, go to /boot/grub and edit (vi) the file named grub.conf (the grub boot manager config file)
10. Stick a '#' as the first character in the 'hiddenmenu' line and change the delay to something reasonable, say maybe 10 (seconds). Save the changes and reboot.
11. Pick your desired OS (Windows or Linux) and have fun.

FYI:
Your swap partition should be twice the size of your memory. So if you have a 1GB box, the swap size should be 2GB. So you are really only adding 3 partitions: '/boot', '/' (aka the root partition), and 'swap'.

It's not difficult unless you want to get complicated with separate partitions for /user, /opt, /var, /etc, ... If you are new to Linux, stick with the 3 required partitions until you really know what you are doing.

ciao,

rexb