Hi everyone.

I just purchased a new 20GB hard drive for my laptop so I can install many different OS so I can learn them. I am such a newbie at doing something like this but I really want to learn. On my other hard drive for my laptop I have WIN ME and I want to put WIN 2K professional on it. My laptop is a 800mhz with 192mb ram with a factory install of WIN ME.

So here are my questions.

1) what OS's should I get and learn? I have mandrake and Win 2K so far.

2) how do I go about setting all the OS's to work on my 20GB drive?? I have been searching the net and everything I see has a differnt way of doing it. Is there an easy way to do it? This new drive has nothing on it and I don't care if I screw it up. as long as I can keep trying.

3) how do I install WIN 2K professional over ME so I can choose which one to boot when. and I really don't want to screw up this drive.

4) please is there someone out there that has documentation that I can read step by step or something? I am really looking forward to putting as many OS's on this drive as I can so I can study each and every one of them.

Thank you,
Tim

PS: i know this sends me an email for replies, but i'll post it anyway....seam108@yahoo.com

oh well. thanx for looking anyhow.

Tim

1) This is a very hard question to answer. Each distro has it's own personality. Try one and if you don't like it try another. If you do a search on this board you will find quite a few opinions. I would suggest either Red Hat 6.2 or Debian on the Linux side. I also like FreeBSD, OpenBSD and BeOS. Solaris is always good to know too.

2) If you are installing 2 OS's you should be able to just partition and install.

3) Win2k SHOULD notice that another version of windows is on the drive and put it in the bootloader. Doesn't always happen though.

4) You can fit many OS's on a drive. It is just a matter of partitioning, patience and a good boot loader.

If you laptop came with WinME.. don't wipe it off unless you have a factory restore disk. SOme of your hardware may only work in WinME. Personally, I wouldn't recommend trying to learn more than two OS's at once and in most cases, even that is one too many.

Forget about WinME.. its not worth your time. Wipe the disk and install Win2K first. Install Mandrake after that and make sure you set it up so that it can boot Win2K as well. Just pay attention during the install and it will prompt you to do so.

Just a word about Linux distro's... I was very impressed with Mandrake 7.0 and 7.1. But I have heard of tons of issues with Mandrake 7.2. I think it may something to do with their "Pentium optimization".
Redhat and Suse are both good bets. Slackware and Debian are not for beginners unless you like doing things the hard way.
I used to use Slackware but now I stick with Redhat. STAY AWAY FROM COREL AND CALDERA!