Thanks, I certainly appreciate everyone's comments on this thread. I now have a further question.
How can I prevent the install of Mandrake Linux from writing a boot record on the Primary drive? Therte is already an XP boot record which permits me to boot from any attached device. Is it feasable to remove the XP drive, attach the FAT32 drive to the Primary Interface, Install Mandrake Linux and then move the drive back to the secondary Interface to permit Windows XP boot record to control where I boot from? Cy Halbach -- Carroll Grigsby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On Friday 07 January 2005 09:23 pm, Yes, but be very, very certain that the Mandrake installer understands that you want Mandrake installed on your slave disk (hdb) and not the primary disk (hda). Note that Mandrake will overwrite the FAT32 formatting on hdb and replace it with a native Linux format; the default is ext3, but other options are available. As part of the installation process, Mandrake will alter the MBR (master boot record) on your primary drive so that you can choose between Mandrake and XP each time that you boot your system. > Will it > install without messing with the NTFS drives on the first IDE Interface? Yes. But bear in mind that while Linux can read files on NTFS partitions, writing to them is not supported. However, Linux has no problems accessing FAT32 partitions, so if you want to be able to have the freedom of reading and writing data that can be accessed from either OS, the standard workaround is to shrink the existing XP partition using Partition Magic or similar, and then create a FAT32 partion in the vacant space. Next, move your Windows data to the new partition and fiddle with your Windows applications so that they know where the data lives. Kinda cool for stuff like music and video, and also useful for correspondence, spreadsheets, yada yada... -- cmg
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