Installing Mandriva from a DOS/Windows partition

For those of us that happen to have a really fast net connection, downloading GNU/Linux may be faster than waiting for the CD to come in with the mail. For others they may not be able to use their CD-ROM during install for whatever reason. Here is a short documentation of how to set up a dual boot Windows and Mandriva Linux from a Windows partition.

I use Windows 98® and have a FAT-32 partition but this should work equally well with a FAT-16 partition. Mandriva uses a Red Hat installer so this process is almost identical to how you would install Red Hat from a Windows partition. The steps were gleaned from their documentation and are only reposted here to simplify things.

The first step is to download or copy the dosutils, images, and Mandrake trees to a directory, I choose 'C:Linux' but anything will work. (A list of Mandriva Linux FTP mirrors ).

Next prepare your system as for any install. If needed backup your files and partition your disk.

Use the 'rawrite' utility from the 'dosutils' directory to prepare your boot disk. I used the 'rawritewin' variant that is included.

Leave your boot disk in the drive and restart the computer. (You may have to adjust your BIOS settings to look for bootable media in the diskette drive. TB)

Begin the installation as normal but choose to install from a Local HD. If you put the files on the 'C:' drive the default partition to install from should be correct, if not change it to your drive. Then go below and enter the directory you used, for me it was '/Linux'.

Then just follow the installation as normal.

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