Hello, I just installed Mandrake 9.0 on a computer (dual boot setup w/ win2000). Very impressive distro btw. It was installed on a single partition, along with a swap partition on the middle of a disk. There are two NTFS partitions on each side. Beforehand, the partition in question was FAT32 formatted, and was assigned the drive letter F in win2000. Upon installation f mandrake, it was split in 2 halves, one ext3 partition and one swap partition. Mandrake worked great. When booting into windows though, It takes several minutes after logging in for the desktop to show up. If the file explorer is started, It will appear to be frozen. When opening files from other programs, the programs appear to hang. Upon starting partition magic, I can see that the partitions are displayed as ext3/swap. Strangely enough, The ext3 partition seems (in partition magic) to be assigned the drive letter F also. I''m thinking the cause of all this would be that windows is still trying to access it as a fat32 partition. Would this be correct? And in that case, how do I make it stop trying to do that. I realize this is actually mostly a windows question, but I suppose most people in windows forums would not have much experience with partitioning and linux.

I am not too sure why Windows is able to do anything in the first place if they are ext3 partitions.

What I have normally done was install Windows, then install Linux. If I was using PM, then I would setup a partition at the beginning just big enough for Windows to install to, then setup a second partition that it can use (when installing programs, you will probably have to tell them to install to drive D: or something).

Then I install Linux. It sounds like you are using two partitions for the Linux system, one for / and one for swap. You will also have to tell LILO or GRUB to take over the MBR.

That way Windows will have its own partitions, and Linux also has its own. If you want to have them share a partition (for MP3s or other data, let''s say), then have a partition setup as FAT32. Still, Windows should be installed to its own partition (the C: drive,or hda1/hda2) to install the base install to.

Thank you for the reply, I am however not looking for newbie information on how to install linux. I have done that dozens of times on diffrent computers with various setups since slackware 3.5 was the latest & greatest.

I am looking for a way to fix this problem in windows without having to reinstall everything again (which is boring ).

I have this far installed TweakUI in windows 2000, and from there force explorer.exe to ignore the drive F:. Explorer now works fine, and windows is back in a usable state. It still waits a couple of minutes after logging in before the desktop is loaded though. It is a little annoying. Any more ideas?

hmmm.... what does a full fsck on your root partition tell you?

Don''t listen to me. I''ve had too much coffee.

A full filesystem scan tells me that everything is OK.

Most likely, Windows still thinks it should have some form of access to the partition. Your Event Viewer''s System Log should be able to show relevant data. Also, is your win2k swap file located on a drive that Windows still has access to?

Is it really annoying ? Do you often boot Windows ?
I''ve been having DOS and Windows 98 along Linux for a couple years, and then I''ve been reformatting a FAT partition to ext2 (it''s an old kernel), and then DOS and Windows complain about it, but I checked (before I put anything important there, since it''s my new /home ) that they both wouldn''t write anything to it in a vain attempt to "fix" what they see as broken. It works fine. They do complain, but since I only boot Windows once every two months, I don''t really care. I''d suggest leaving it if you can live with it, as Windows does have a frightening tendency to "fix" stuff, and that usually means losing data. Unless you''ve got backups, of course. Reminds me I should make some...