I had WinXP Home Ed. nicely working on my Compaq Presario. I wanted to install Linux so much (without hardly any knowledge) that I followed a book and installed Mandrake 10.1. Installment went successful, everything seemed to be working. However, I lost XP (at least it seems to me), and I know I messed up while designating the partition part. When I chose to break the HD into two partitions, it said I had bad sector. I ran chkdsk, no Error. I defragmented files, all went fine. So, while installing Linux, I guess I deleted or modified the same partition with XP. I was left off with 'failsafe' and 'linux' to boot from. I tried using my recovery disks to get back to the original factory setting of HP,but couldn't complete that either, however the boot menu got modified. Now I have 'linux', 'windows', 'windows1', and 'failsafe'.

I bought an extra hard disk and installed win98 on it. Now, I can access both, but only when I designate them as the Master. Whatever is slave, doesn't appear on the menu. However, when I hit the Setup, it does recognize both drives.

Can someone kindly help me how I will be able to delete the unnecessary partitions from the old Hard Disk and just leave Linux there, and leave the second disk with win98, but be able to boot from one of them at a time, without physically changing the Master-Slave setting?

Set the Win98 disk as master.

Run Linux installation pogram. When it asks you where to install Linux, choose the second HD (should be named /dev/hdb if they are on the same cable).

Delete all partitions on the second disk and crate a new one formatted as ext3 and mounted to / (choose advanced partitioning in Linux install (make sure you don't touch anything on the first HD!)). Don't bother yourself with a swap patition.

When you are asked where to install the bootloader (GRUB) choose the first HD (/dev/hda). Linux install should be smart enough to put Windows into the boot menu alongside with Linux.

You can set Win98 disk as slave, even if you've installed 98 when it was master.

Then if you can boot to Linux, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst , add the following lines:

title Win98
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1


(that is, if you installed 98 on the first partition of the second disk)

This tells GRUB to swap master and slave settings on software-level without needing to change jumpers. It fools Win98 to think it's still on master disk.