dual boot windows mandrake 10.1

[psych-major]

Actually, you're right. That will work fine!

[hurleyint1386]

phew. im glad i didnt mess things up haha. ok well that's almost done formatting, so once it's finished, ill pop in mandrake and start installing and ask questions when needed. ive got a final exam from 4-6, but it's visual basic so i should be out of there with in 30 minutes and ill be back here to toy with it however im going to get as much done as i can before i have to leave

[psych-major]

SWEET!

Good luck on your final...

[hurleyint1386]

thanks!

ok, so i booted mandrake, and i have some options for partitioning. im used to just wiping the whole thing clean, then installing, but i definitely dont want to mess anything up. here are the options:
Use free space
Erase entire disk
Use free disk space on the Windows partition
Custom Disk Partitioning

i beleive i should do use free space, but i just want to make sure

[psych-major]

I've tried Mandrake exactly once, about 3 years ago, so I'm not sure. I think use free space would do it, as use free space on Windows partition would imply the FAT32 partition. You can also go into custom and poke around, just don't commit anything if you're not sure.

[hurleyint1386]

im going through custom, and when i create the swap, should i choose the linux swap filetype? or use the ext3 and change the name to /swap?

[psych-major]

Choose swap for the swap partition, and reiserFS for /, if you have that choice, otherwise EXT3.

This is an interesting discussion for me, as I use Slackware, which is generally considered to be harder to install than other distros, yet what you're doing right now is handled automagically by the Slack setup!

[psych-major]

Also, if it's like SuSE, it should check your configuration for you and let you know if you've inadvertantly done something retarded before it goes ahead with the install.

[hurleyint1386]

really? well here's some good news, mandrake is now installing, so that's good. but once this finishes, how does it determine which to boot to? (as you can obviously tell i have no experience with dual boot)

[psych-major]

On mine, it boots to a lilo screen with a choice of Windows or Slackware, with Windows as default, which it proceeds to boot after 30 seconds unless I choose Slack.

Yours should be similar, but with a pretty blue GRUB boot screen with similar choices, and it will either have a countdown to booting the default, or it may wait until yo make a choice.

[hurleyint1386]

ok awesome. well once this finishes, ill make sure to post the results and say how it's working out! thanks a lot for your help! im sure ill be asking for more questions haha.

[psych-major]

Any time!

[hurleyint1386]

hey, ok so it's up and running beautifully :-D but now i have a question... how do i access the fat32 drive in linux? thanks

[psych-major]

Mandrake should have mounted it somewhere for you. Usually in the /mnt directory. Are you using KDE or Gnome?

[hurleyint1386]

im using kde