quote:
Originally posted by Kat:
1)Will dual booting with XP in NTFS be problematic? I am putting Mandrake 8.2 on my Slave drive(XP is on the Master). And if i decide later to remove XP, can i boot into Linux using the boot disk and change LILO? I am undecided on whether or not to use the disk to boot into Mandrake or to configure XP and LILO for a diskless boot.
it's up to you. There's not proper read-write support for ntfs in linux, due to Microsoft not telling anybody how ntfs works. BUT i would recommend putting lilo on the master boot record and having a windows ntfs partition at the start of the drive, then a linux ext3 partition for linux, then use the rest of the drive for fat32 partitions containing any files or data that you want to be able to access from both systems.
You can see here what i mean. In this case the first partition would be NTFS.
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2)On my Slave drive, i understand that you fdisk first using the Win98 boot disk and then Linux will do its own formatting in the installation program(or something like that). is this correct? Currently, on the drive(Slave) there is one Windows NTFS partion and will be no data(gotta burn off the warez 
). There are no programs or system files(other than what Windows needs to recognize the drive) on the Slave. This is more of a doublecheck for me than anything else.
aha! you have two drives! in that case it's even easier! all that partitioning crap is useless to you! From exparience, mandrake linux has an easy to use graphical formatting/partitioning tool that will allow you to reorganise your partitions during the installation of mandrake, i expect similar tools are included in other distros. Remember though that NTFS is not properly supported yet, so you might want to put a fat32 partition somewhere as i say, just to make it easy to share files over the two systems.
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3)Can i use the data CDs i burned in Windows in Linux? I used Nero 5.0 to burn them all and i don't need a program to view the files. I looked at one site and it was talking about recompiling the kernel to allow Linux to recognize the files on the CD, yet another site had a link to the same site calling the information there obsolete. One of the CDs i burned is in UDP format and the others are in CDFS. I was wondering if since some of the files were on a NTFS formatted drive before i burned them, would that worsen the chances of me being able to read them in Linux? I don't think so, but don't know for sure either. I noticed on some CDs i burned that there is a Microsoft system file on them. But,i would imagine Linux would just ignore it(meaning it won't prevent Mandrake from reading the CD, but will be listed as a file on the CD).
so long as they're burned right, yes, and it sounds like they are if there's files on them. have a look at the documents on
http://linuxiso.org to see if you did it right, either that or just reboot with the CDs in the drive and see if it works!
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4)Is networking with a Win2k Pro host going to be a nightmare? My brother managed to get the internet working on his computer during his 24 hours of Linux on the same network. My hardware checked out ok, i guess i have had so many problems in Windows, i am expecting the worst.
i am a bit of a networking novice i'm afraid, so not much help here, but if you do get any problems it will basically just be figuring out how to work around something that windows cannot do, either that or just some feature that you haven't had fully explained to you, or do not properly understand yet, and that's not a
problem, that's a
challenge!
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I am hoping that once i get going in Mandrake, i can dump Windows for good. Windows is the bane of my existence.
I know what you mean. I hope you can do that too, good luck!
edit - hey, since you're using mandrake, hop on over to
MandrakeUser.org. They have tons of useful stuff there, i have found them very helpful.
[ June 27, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]
