Dual boot with XP after installation of Mandrake

[Kevin222]

Hey, I was wondering how to dual boot with XP and mandrake after installation of mandrake.

I know that I need to partition my drive, but it seems that after choosing "Erase my hard drive" during the Mandrake installation, the partitions are a mess.

I contemplated just erasing the HDD again somehow, and installing windows, then mandrake.

*note, I had XP pre-installed when I bought my PC, so the only thing I have is the system restore disk, which..is pretty much XP.

Any help would be greatly appriciated

-Kevin

[kkubasik]

basicaly, at some point during the xp restor, you just need to select only 1/2 of your hd space. then install mandrake on the open space, if you have more problems (ie bootloades) then post here.

[Kevin222]

Basically, this means make an NTFS partition with the free space that I have right now?

How would I go about resizing the extended partition that I have now?

I tried doing this using qtparted, but an error window poped up with nothing in it....

[tkott]

For a linux installation, you need to make a separate partition. It doesn't have to be formatted, since the linux install will just format it with ext3 anyway probably.

If you post everything / anything visible that went wrong with qtparted, people might be more able to help (note this does not include me :o )

[Kevin222]

I understand that I need an ext3 partition to install linux, but the question is, how to resize the extended partition and make an NTFS partition with the free space.

What I really need to know is how to do this...

Thank you for your time

[kkubasik]

programs like partition magic for windows will do it, but i dont know if that will 'see' an ext partioin, and since you dont have windows, is not much help either, i dont know of any, most peopleare going the other dircetion, but look for a 'non destrucitve' partition program....

[stathisx]

in linux there is qtparted --partition magik clone to do that..although new versions of linux have easy partitioning methods provided in installation.you can use partition magik instead in order linux to find the unallocated space you want to install linux and install it there without affecting windows at all

[Kevin222]

I have knoppix, which also has qtparted, but when I try to resize the extended partition that includes the swap partition and the ext3 partition, it says that "/dev/hda2" (extended partition) is being used.

[kkubasik]

unmount it using the command

umount /dev/hda2

[Kevin222]

no dice, it still came up with the same error. I tried to unmount with all the partitions, and it said that they were not active.

grr.... I really need to dual boot, its very important.

Any more suggestions?

I tried to just uninstall mandrake and make an ntfs partition, but after using my system restore disks, it just came up with "MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM"