OK....heres the deal. I took my 100GB harddrive and installed WinXP, partitioning 9GB for the boot partition and later after it was fully installed, I created a 1 GB partition to be used for the swap file.
Then I installed Mandrake 9.0 and created 60GB vfat partition so that I could acceess files from either Windows or Linux. I allowed Mandrake to partition the rest of the drive into / , /usr , /home , and swap partitions. Three of them are ext3 and the swap partition is formatted however swap partitions are formatted. All good and simple except WinXP started really flaking out sooooooo..... Since I don't know any other way to do it, I trashed the whole thing and started over. Removing the partitions with Delpart and doing an fdisk /mbr to clean out the master boot record. Well this didn't remove the Linux stuff. I installed WinXP again but it wouldn't complete the final stage in which it saves the settings.....I assume that this is when the mbr record is saved. Tried it again and again. Finally I found the Win2K would install, so I did that. Then I installed Mandrake. It all works but now Lilo has an entry for not only Linux and NT but also for old_NT and old_Linux....this is how I figured out that I didn't really clean up the drive from the previous installations. In the Windows world, Delpart and fdisk /mbr pretty much cleans up everything. How do I start from a clean slate with Linux? Thanks, Cleve
