I had Windows XP Professional installed on my comp and I wanted to install Mandrake 10 and set it up as a dual boot. I installed Mandrake on the same drive as I had XP, but when I restarted after the installation finished, the comp simply froze when it should've brought up the option of what OS to boot into. Any ideas what may have happened, because I'm going to have to reinstall both OS's now? Is there anything special I need to do in order to get this to work? And should I still install XP first and then install Mandrake from within XP, or try it the other way?

did you install on the same drive but different partition or the same partition as winxp, which would have probably been deleted and formated as ext2/3.


best way to do it is , get win xp installed on partition 1 then make 2,3 partion for mandrake and let lilo boot loader detect xp.

if u wanna see if xp is still alive boot with ur xp cd to recovery console and fdisk /mbr

Actually I believe the XP Master Boot Record fix command is a little different.

As linux cant write to NTFS atm, I suggest you leave a little FAT32 partition so you can save linux -> Fat32 -> Windows, or use some removable media.

So if I were to start over fresh, when I partition the drive, you're saying I should leave some room not partitioned so that when I go to install Mandrake, I can then have it partition the remaining space and use that for the linux install? See if what I said is correct.