dual booting xp and linux

[DUSTIN]

hi
i have xp pro running perfectly right now. i just bought another hard drive and was thinking about dual booting with mandrake. is this easy to do if i already have xp installed on one drive? can i install mandrake on the new hdd if they are both NTFS file systems? exactly what would i need to do to get mandrake installed and running? thanks.

[OOPS!]

Yep you can. Just install the 2nd drive. Pop in the Mandy CD and boot from it. It will ask you which drive you want to install it on. Select the drive, partition and go.

Mandy will default to ext2 for its' file system. Let it. You can choose to format a number of different file systems, but to start just use ext2. Then if you want to get into journaling and other stuff after you learn about Linux go ahead.


OOPS!

[DUSTIN]

will mandrake automatically set up the different partitions needed or can i just use one big partition? is there anything else that i have to know or do during the installation? thanks

[DUSTIN]

also 1 other thing
i downloaded mandrake 8.1 from the website. i downloaded 3 cd image files that i'm going to burn.
1. Mandrake81-cd1-inst.i586
2. Mandrake81-cd2-ext.i586
3. Mandrake81-cd3-supp.i586
can anyone tell me what each of these cds is for? thanks in advance

[Statica]

Please read:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader.html
for multibooting with NT-based OS

Originally posted by DUSTIN also 1 other thing i downloaded mandrake 8.1 from the website. i downloaded 3 cd image files that i'm going to burn. 1. Mandrake81-cd1-inst.i586 - Installation CD 2. Mandrake81-cd2-ext.i586 - Installation CD2 and server apps 3. Mandrake81-cd3-supp.i586 - Supplementary applications can anyone tell me what each of these cds is for? thanks in advance

[DUSTIN]

how to i make a boot disk for xp? also for mandrake?
if something goes wrong, can i just take the hard drive with mandrake on it out and boot xp just like before?
thanks