Duel booting windows/linux

[Richard Beer]

Okay I have downloaded a distribution of linux and put it on a disk (Mandriva one), I have two hardrives, I have my 110GB running windows XP media center edition and I have a second 20GB one i took from an old windows ME, the ME operating system has been deleted via format to NTFS. I would like to put linux onto my second hardrive but I do not know how to partition or install it onto the second drive, I have tried using live install but I am not sure what to do as it asks for partitioning.

 

[DeeJay-Mo]

There should be an option to partition the disk during the install process. The disk in question should be named /dev/hdb. You will need at least two partitions, a root partition and a swap partition. If you like you can also create a third partiton for your /home directory. The root partition should be formatted either with ext2, ext3 or reiserfs file system. The swap partition should be formatted as swap. As you will be unable to read your linux partitions from Windows it may also be useful to have a small fat32 partition that you can use to transfer files between linux and Windows.
Hope that helps.