Currently running win98 on my humble setup and I've decided to take the plunge into linux (mandrake 9.2). my plan is to fit a second hard drive into my pc and install linux there.
My questions are, will this work, can this be done easily and would a 2 gig hard drive be big enough to install mandrake? bearing in mind this is only for a beginer to experiment with.
Thanks in advance for any help

As you already have a Win9x boot drive, add the second drive as slave to it and Mandrake will ask you which drive you want to install to. It will auto-partition the drive for you, and 2 Gb should be enough.

Thanks for that info. Just one more question, how do I swap to linux from windows? am I right thinking I will have to shut down reboot into the bios and change the boot order, or is there an easier way to do it.

Mandrake will set up a bootloader (either Grub or Lilo) that will give you the choice of OS at boot time. Happy Linuxing

Once again the swimming pools of life had been tainted by the incontinent toddlers of fate

successful instalation (I think), just one minor query. After loading I log in with user name and password then what is supposed to happen??????????? it seems to be wanting a text input, how do i get the gui?

You should have been given the option during install of either a text or gui logon. However assuming your graphics subsystem was detected and set up correctly by mandrake, type "startx" at the prompt, just leave out the "" "". This should start the gui, and once up and running there will be a control panel somewhere where you can alter system settings to your liking. Sorry for being a bit vague but I run Suse Linux and am not up on Mandrake.

Thanx for tha info, I am now writing this reply using the Galeon web browser in mandrake, so far so good