Mandrake 9.1 booting w/ Windows O.S.'s

hi,

im new with Mandrake, in fact i haven't tried this, until i cant resist to read from lots of articles on how good this O.S. is, so i decided to download the Mandrake 9.1 and plan to install it to my Dell Inspiron 2100 Notebook PC w/ 256 memory and Pentium 700Mhz.

i have windows 98 installed on drive C:, windows 2000 on drive D:, windows XP on drive E; program files on drive F:, and my data files on Drive G:

i still have 3 more Gigs spare on my harddrive, is this enough for the Mandrake to run? i jst wanna experiment it as a workstation first, doing documents, printing my personal docs send and receiving email,and sharing some files to my friends PC who is running windows also.

is there somebody can give me to the ryt path on installing Mandrake 9.1 to my spare partition and give me an idea on how to do it w/o destroying my windows O.S and still be able to load it after i install the mandrake 9.1

thnks
joel

Heh. Yes you can do all that, but it might be a bugger for you to set up a good grub.conf. Once you stop reffering to your drives by a letter name it'll be easier too. I don't know how your partitions are set up and how many physical drives you have either, so I can't tell you /dev/hdc2 or anything like that. (hdc2, hd= IDE Hard Disk. C = 3rd physical drive, or master drive on secondary channel. 2 is the partition, or the 2nd partition. 2nd partition on the secondary master IDE channel).

That should help you figure it out. Have it use the MBR for loading, and then your boot loader sort out the other OS's (you'll get a menu upon boot). 3g should be enough space, specially if you compile your kernel with NTFS read support and VFAT support, you can mount the other drives to access thier data.

i only have one hard drive installed on it, and i just partition that drive to handle the different O.S.'s so ur saying dat i have to install grubb on the master boot record to handle the boot loader? i just read also that u can edit the boot.ini of windows XP and handle it to load for Mandrake. would this be possible? how will i attain this kind of solution?

thnks again for the help

I have a question. Why the hell do you need 3 different versions of windows? You don't seem like a developer that would need to test in different enviroments. Seems like a waste of disk space to me. If it's for certs, 98 is deprecated. 2000 will be moving that way shortly.

im using this to some of my clients..ur right, but i cant get rid of them coz i need it for my job.some of my clients have old windows in w/c i use this to communicate w/ them