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DanaReale

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Installing Mandrake 6.1 on a >10.2GB drive

Since we have a 10gig hard drive, we were told that we have to arrange our partitions in a certain order so that LILO can work (we'd like a dual-boot Win98 [2nd ed.] and Linux system).  Is there any way to do this from Partition Magic?  I've Ghosted our Win98 partition, for safe keeping, so wiping the whole hard drive is an option as well.
I know that people must have had this problem before - we need more How-To's on this one!
Many thanks!
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jprohart

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tolmeda

You really don't have a lot to worry about. Just make sure LILO gets installed at the very beginning of the drive. The order and location of the other partitions doesn't really matter much. Here's what you do...

I would suggest repartioning and reformating the whole drive (but since you've got Partition Magic you could use that to create a new partition for Linux instead of wiping out Win98).

Boot from a DOS floppy and run fdisk. Set up one primary partition and one extended partition. Format the primary partition and install Win98 just like normal. Then install Linux on the extended partition (the install program will format it for you). The install program will also set up LILO for you. All you have to do is let LILO copy over your Master Boot Record which Win98 set up (don't panic, it's not a big deal). This will put LILO at the beginning of the drive. It will also ask you what other OS's you have on the drive and where they are. Once you got that done you're all set.

When you reboot, at the LILO prompt, hit tab. This gives you a list of the OS's you can boot to. Just type the name of the one you want.

If you need more details check here:
http://www.linux.org/help/minihowto.html
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Thanks for the help!

I'm doing just that as I'm typing this.  One questions, though - should I enable large disk support?  I was told by someone in a Linux newsgroup that I need the Linux partition first (10gig total, 3gig for linus, 7 gig for Win98), but fdisk won't let me create an extended partition without a primary DOS one first.  Well, I Ghosted my drive, so at least I have a back-up - here goes nothing!
You can create a primary partition for Linux ( boot), then a primary partition for windows, and an extended partition.
Use fdisk under Linux (during install).

Bye