Dual boot question

I just bought a new HD to have a place to put Ghost images. I have wanted to learn a little about Linux and thought I could put Mandrake on this HD and dual boot. The question I have is, can I create a partition on the new drive for windows and put my Ghost images and other backups there? By the way, I am running Windows XP on the first HD.

Thanks!

 

I just realized that this post probably belongs in Software. I was thinking I had a new HD and put it here.

 

Yes you can create a dual boot, I've got a couple of them going with Linux and windows. Mandrake has a good program that will come up in the install that works well. From that program you can create 3 patitions if you like one windows one Linux and one storage for your images.
Every Linux program has a different patition program it seems and I think the one in Mandrake is Lilo but I don't remember all the details, but will do what I can to help.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. Now I have something to do in the evenings this week.

 

tomb50
hello, and welcome to MajorGeeks.
There is a free bootmanager available for download on this site.
It is called GAG:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2588
Like mgrist, I too mess with the Linux.
If you need any help, let us know.

Just be careful not to overwrite your MBR (Master Boot Record) when you install the Linux.

mgrist: during the install of Mandrake, does it prompt you to make a boot floppy? I bet it does. If tomb50 has a floppy drive, and he makes a boot floppy, then he can just install to the second harddrive, put Lilo, (or GRUB)
there, and then just use the floppy to boot into Mandrake.

(Just an idea)

 

lilo and grub should work fine with ntldr, as long as windows is installed first. as a note to everyone using one hard drive, you must use fdisk or cfdisk if you want to dualboot properly; diskdruid will ruin your ntldr (iirc) if you have the 2.6 kernel. correct me if i'm wrong.

 

Yep windows should be installed first. The second part of your equation I'm not sure about.
Hey Robster, I've never used gag but when I used patition magic I still had to pretty much do it all again in Lilo. Patition Magic formatted a patition in ext 2 or what ever it is but when I went to load Linux it told me the patition wasn't ready for Linux, only it said it a little more geeky then that
As far as the MBR that's where I always install my boot loader. Tomb, follow Robsters lead on that, I may just be been getting lucky.

 

Oops missed that part. Yes what you say is true. There is an option to install the boot loader to a floppy, MBR or another that I can't recall

 

Thanks for all the information. I'll be doing this soon and will comment on the results.