Hello everyone. Let me tell you what I've done.

1 - I wiped out my old 80 GB hard drive and I am freshly installing everything.
2 - I partitioned the drive roughly:
C: 7 GB
D: 20 GB
E: 20 GB
F: 29 GB
3 - I installed XP on C: without any problems.
4 - I formatted E: and F: to FAT32
5 - I installed Mandrake 10.1 onto D: (after partitioning out 2 GB for swap)

Everything is all right. I am very new to Linux so I have no idea how to do anything with it yet. Here are my questions:

1: I was under the impression that I would have access to the E: and F: drives from both XP and Linux. Is this not so? And if so, how do I access it through Linux KDE? I can get into them from XP without any problem.

2: The system boots to LILO which looks clunky to me. I would much prefer to have Windows boot the system with the two options "Windows XP" and "Linux" on a startup screen with XP highlighted and a 10 second timer so that it would always default to XP. I imagine that I would have to disable LILO and put Linux boot into the boot.ini file? Any POINTERS on how to do this?

Thanks to everyone.

PeregrinoI think your C is waaaay too small for EVEN a minimal XP install. i would go bigger now while you can.

You can see the drives with linux. If you are using KDE, Konqueror can do it, and you may also have another file manager installed as well.

Lilo works fine and can be customized as you envision. There is absolutely NO advantage to having Windows try to boot things. Windows does not play nice with other OS'es. Hopefully EYE CANDY in a boot screen is not what you're after.

Take your time and learn as you go. Suse has good support and you can also find other forums with that Google button. http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm

This nifty little piece of software may be what you are looking for.ill have to boot my linux and get that, then all i have to do is figure out a way to play my windows games on linux and ill be setIn the end Windows games are best played on Windows, Apple games on Apple, etc. Some emulators work for some games, but it is a work in progress.oh well, i can play my audio files that are on my NTFS partition while in linux with this program right?With a modern Linux kernel, yes.sweet... the only thing i'll miss is my EQ software that came with my integrated AC'97 audio controler, 6 channel, but the rear channel only puts out alittle distorted audio on the left or right channel, CANT remember whichKeep looking. Linux/Unix has always been ahead with its audio processing tools.I dual booted Ubuntu and xp, I used the Grub loader that was with the Ubuntu install and it was ok, Also i'd allow at least 20gb for xp.

I've now uninstalled Ubuntu as its was far to slow on my machine, I'll be trying another distro.I bet you anything it was the desktop you were using that was too slow, not Ubuntu, per se. Gnome and KDE are quite resource-intensive.

Still, VectorLinux is a good choice for something that is speedier in its default configuration.