Windows Vista & Mandriva On Same PC

[MrCanuck]

Hello.

I recently purchased a new Dual Core Acer Laptop. It has two hard drives, Drive C is the main drive with the OS on it (Vista Home Premium). That drive is 69gb, it also has a second drive, another 69gb drive.

I recently heard about Linux, it sounded neat so i tried it on my desktop, and now would like to also have it on my Laptop.

I am wondering if it is easy to install Linux on the second drive, and still have the option to dual boot. And if so how do you go about doing that?

Or would you suggest me shrinking the main drive, and installing it on there?

Thanks.

[daark.child]

Yes you can dual boot on your laptop. It should be ok to install Mandriva on the second hard drive (thats how I used to dual boot when I was a newbie, so that Linux is sepatate from Windows). During installation, Mandriva will detect your Windows installation and add it to the bootloader, so when you start your computer, you will have the option to boot Mandriva or Windows. Make sure that you select the correct hard drive during install time because you may lose data permanently if you accidentally install into your Windows partition.

[MrCanuck]

I put the Mandriva disk into the DVD Drive, restarted Laptop, and began the Mandriva Install. I selected Drive D to install it to (thats my second drive), before install i had to create a partition on that drive so i did that making it 30gb, half the HD's size. It installed fine, then i went to restart but there was no Dual Boot screen like what shows up on my Desktop.
It just started to load Windows Vista like normal.

I went into the bios thinking if i changed it so it loaded from Drive D first instead of Drive C then it might start the Dual Boot program prompting me if i want to use Vista or Linux. But there is no other hard drive listed in the Bios. Just Drive C, and then the CD Rom drive and then the USB ports.

Any suggestions as to what i should do now?

Thanks.

[daark.child]

When you did the initial Mandriva installation, did you choose to install the bootloader to the MBR of your first hard disk?

[MrCanuck]

hmmm that i am not sure, i remember there was 3 options for that, and i think i selected the second option, but i cant remember what that one was.

[daark.child]

Well, you could try to reinstall (into the second hard drive) and when it comes to the bootloader, make sure its installed into the MBR of the first hard drive and see if that helps.

[MrCanuck]

ok i will give that a try. thanks.

[MrCanuck]

I did what you said, and now its showing the dual boot loader screen

But there seems to still be a problem. I select it to load Mandriva 2008 Spring, and it then goes to the blue mandriva screen with the loading bar. After that is done instead of it taking me to the normal login screen, i see a black screen with Mandriva in the bottom right corner. And in the top left it says this in simple text.

Mandriva Linux release 1008.1 (Official) for i586
Kernel 2.6.24.4-Laptop-1mnb on a Dual-processor i686 / tty1
localhost login: _

what did i do wrong now? lol

[rokytnji]

When I used to run Mandriva it did the same thing to me after updating once. I just enter my login name for (localhost login: _) and then my password when prompted and it took me right to the desktop. I didn't have that issue again after that. You should have had to enter a user name and password during the install.

[MrCanuck]

I gave that a try, and it then comes up in simple text, same black screen.

Last login: Sat Nov 1 17:51:35 on tty1
[william@localhost ~]$ _


The little _ is blinking and you can type there like a command prompt.