I realize this post is a couple months old....wonder how the guy made out?
Thought I'd put in my 2cents anyway, in case anyone else has a similar question. I loaded Linux Mandrake on my box awhile back. The process was a little sticky to load Mandrake 8 and Lilo boot loader, because I was triple booting (5 partitions) 98SE/2kpro/XP.
What finally worked for me was to use PM7 to split one existing partition into about 5 /ext2 partitions (one each for root, apps, boot, etc.) also leaving 1.5 gigs of Fat 32 on that same drive letter. Partition Magic did a far better job than the Mandrake installer to setup the partitions. lol - I went round and round with that process for a day or 2
Then, I loaded Mandrake and Lilo boot loader, only I made SURE I put the lilo boot loader on it's own ext2 partition. I don't remember the exact process (been awhile) but previous tries of letting Lilo load to the default settings never did work. Adding lines to my boot.ini never worked either - maybe because I was trying to load too many OS's?
Then I loaded Bootmagic to take over the boot choice on startup. Gave me a choice then on boot- Windows or Linux. Choosing Linux took me to the Lilo boot screen. I'm not sure why I couldn't get it to go w/out Bootmagic - I could get to the boot screen, but it wouldn't get me "in" to Linux until I used Boot Magic.
Another great thing about Partition Magic and ext2 partitions is, the only way I could *see* the ext2 partitions from windows was through Partition Magic. Came in handy recently when I had 1.5 gigs of Fat 32 on the same G: drive as the ext2 partitions, and I was going to repartition that whole drive as a slave drive.
I decided to take Mandrake off - I had too many OS's and too little time)
I was able to delete the ext2's and resize all 5 partitions through PM, without losing the data on that 1.5gig of fat32 - the only portion of that drive letter with the sub partitions of ext2 , that *windows* recognized .
Then I installed a new 60gig HD, dual booting only 98SE and XP and use the old 30 gig as slave for data. I was horrified when I installed windows for the first time and saw I had 9 drive letters, plus the 2 cdroms! 4 partitions on the new drive and 5 on the old. My brane is too tired to deal with that many, so I slimed them down a bit
Said all that to say... it is a little cumbersome to get things setup the way you like them on your drive to co-exist with Linux. I probably took the long way around with my limited tech knowledge, but Partition Magic is the way to go. It allows you to setup your drive the way YOU want it setup, and if you change your mind it's a snap to rearrange things.
Great tip Radministrator, to do one operation at a time with PM. Good advice for any changes while in Windows. Reboot kind of clears the air so it can digest things before additional changes are made