New to Mandrake

[steveo]

I installed Man9.1 to a formatted HDD (known as D) while my C drive houses XP. I had the PC boot to CD (linux iso) while the C drive remained disconnected during the install. Mandrake seems to be ok and I surfed the net with it for a few minutes before shutting down the PC. I re-connected the C drive with it's designation as primary master, Cd-r as primary slave. Mandrake is designated secondary master with no slave attached.

If I disconnect the C drive the PC boots to Linux from the D drive.

If I connect the C drive XP boots while My Computer shows no instance of D drive being connected (even though it is).

When D drive has no data but formatted it shows up in My Computer and works fine while I'm in XP.

For all I know this is how things should be considering how I installed Linux.

The boot device is still set to CD-rom as I saw no reason to change it back to floppy after I started using XP some momths ago.

What I would like is a option at boot up to choose between the two O/S. I've peeked around XP looking for a dual boot option and found nothing in making this simple task occur. I'll keep snooping around the net looking for a solution but perhaps someone could lend a hand in the mean time and inbetween time.

thanks in advance

S

[pentachris]

My BIOS allows me to press F8 at startup for a boot menu. From there I can specify which HDD (or other device) I want to boot from. Watch your BIOS screen carefully at startup and see if you have that option and just overlooked it before.

[steveo]

Yes, F8, it's the little things one overlooks. I should've tried this right off.

I used F8 but it only shows XP as a boot option.

[mjc]

It looks like you don't have a bootloader on C tah will recognise the Linux partition.

You will either need to boot from the floppy/CD or add a bootloader to the XP install.

Personally I would leave both drives the way they are and add a third party bootloader.

[pentachris]

And XOSL (http://xosl.sourceforge.net/) is a great third party bootloader.

I added that link rather hastily. Is the XOSL project an ex-project? www.xosl.org is down...

[shanmuga]

I multi boot xp pro,millenium,redhat and drake.XOSL is what i use, its amazing for its ease of use and simplicity.

[steveo]

Ok, I'll use that bootloader.

[pave_spectre]

I used to use XOSL but switched to GAG (http://gag.sourceforge.net/).