Installation

First some links for reference:
Inquirer install guide mostly about Mandrake 9.0

Mandrake Install comments

Mandrake Quick install guide

Disclaimer: in (some parts of) these install comments I discuss things from the point of Mandrake linux, but a lot I describe here is the advice I'd give to anyone wanting to install any flavour of linux.

Preparations

Harddisk preparation for dual-boot.
As preparations for the linux install, you may want to boot windows and do the following.
(I'm supposing your PC already has some version of windows installed, most likely windows 95/98(SE)/ME.) You may have one or more hard drives in your system, for now I assume you have just one, with one or two partitions. In the case of one partition, all is fine, just run scandisk and defragment that c:\ drive, and we're good to go.
In the case of 2 partitions, after defragmenting the c:\ drive, make an extra directory on it, to which you copy all your important files from d:\ drive. Also, you may want to backup all your personal data (to floppy disk or cd-r(w), this is a good idea in any case). That way, we can actually thrash your d:\ partition during the install process and speed things up.

Windows with NTFS partitions (NT, 2000, XP potentially)
At the moment of this writing, no linux tool/distro actually manages to adapt ntfs partitions successfully,.. to be more precise, even reading and writing is considered problematic; Mandrake 9.0 has support for reading, so that's not too bad. So you will have to use a 3rd party tool like Partition Magic to adapt/make some partitions for Mandrake linux.
Update: as from Mandrake 9.1 the installation / disk partitioning tool will be able to resize NTFS partitions! However, it seems that this can only function well if there is no data in the part that you free. Some defragmenters put data at the end of a partition, make sure you don´t use one of those. For more info, you will have to surf the web, as I don´t have any ntfs partitions...

Another hint: once you use a partitioning tool, you should/can only use that tool in the future. Unless, in an extreme case, you do a full rollback of your harddisk, which generally makes you lose all data. (This can be done by restoring an older partitioning table, you need a utility floppy disk from your harddisk manufacturer.)

Before installing
Preparing your system BIOS for the installation of linux.
Go into your BIOS, how to do that is usually shown during the boot process, often by holding the delete-key during the bios checks. Check your motherboard manual for the correct key(s) if you're experiencing problems.
In the BIOS, you want to make sure that you're not overclocking your system (processor, pci-, agp-bus and fsb at standard clockspeed). If you don't know what I'm talking about, I think we may safely assume you're not overclocking your system. Somewhere you can select:
PnP (or: Plug and Play) OS=Yes/No
set that to No.
In the same vain:
Shadow Video Bios = No
Boot virus protection = No
Boot device order: first cd (if you're installing from cd's that is..), then harddisk.
From the Mandrake install guide:
If you want to use a printer locally connected to your machine, make sure that the parallel port mode is set to ECP+EPP (or at least one of them) and not to SPP. If it's not set this way, you will still be able to print, but your printer will not be detected automatically so you will have to configure it by hand.
Also make sure the printer is powered on and properly connected to your machine beforehand.

I'm not aware of more things that may be problematic to a successful linux install or use, please email me if you have more info on general (to all kinds of mobo's) settings that should be set in a certain way to obtain a functional linux system.

The installation itself

Just put the first cd in the tray and reboot the pc; then type enter when you get to the question if you want to install, upgrade or other. (For completeness, yes you can install from the images on a FAT32 (windows) partition, or from a linux partition, or over the network with NFS, or via ftp. But I won't comment on that here.)

I will now just give some tips and explanations on what and how I do things. The following parts are in the installation; I've intermittently put my comments, whereever I have tips to spare:

Choosing Your Language
-do not pick Dutch as your primary/only language; there is a bug (that can be corrected btw) that prevents the Mandrake Control Centre to function properly during normal use. BTW I always choose a number of languages, since then it will also install the spellcheckers for those languages (so I just pick English, French, Dutch, etcetc..)

License Terms of the Distribution

Keyboard and mouse settings
-mouse detection has been reported to fail in some cases of a standard wheelmouse; I have had one install on a PIII system where it did fail; rebooting through a reset was my choice, then I just selected standard ps/2 mouse and all was well to go on.

Installation Class
-I always take expert. Makes me feel better too ;-)

Selecting the Mount Points
-you did prepare your partitions as I described above? Good, then you can use diskdrake (the disk partitioning tool) to setup your harddisk for use with Mandrake. In case you've already had a linux system on your machine, you should know most of this, at least enough to adapt your partitioning table to your needs.
So, just reduce the size of your first partition to have enough space for the others;
What used to be your windows c:\ drive is not directly seen; however, you can see something like: hda (as a tabular shaped thing, with another behind it if you happen to have another hard disk, hdb), a colour code and a bar with some colour on it, possibly just one, with text inside it (hda1:/mnt/windows), or if you had 2 windows partitions (in windows called c:\ and d:\ but now known as hda1:/mnt/win_c and hda2 (or 5):/mnt/win_d) (etc if you had more partitions).
In the centre you can select what the system must do with the partition that is selected (with the mousepointer), as in: delete, mount point, resize, etc. Any grey part is unused/free diskspace, click on it and select what you want to make of it: ext3 or fat32 partition. Note that if your hard drive is fully used (no free space) you have to resize the hda1 (win_c, windows c:\ partition) and make it smaller, or delete the second windows partition, so you can then use that free space to create the necessary linux partitions. My advice is to make your partition table look somewhat as follows:
(normally, there is hda1, then hda5,6,7,8 etc, due to certain standards in counting; the primary partition can contain a maximum of 4 partitions, the extended can contain many more logical partitions, hence the second partition can be hda5, since it may well be in the extended partition... so hda5 might also be hda2, depending on if you've made partitions with Partition Magic or another 3rd party partition manager; also, the partition number may not be in order from left to right, i.e. hda1, hda5, hda8, hda9, hda10, hda7,... in this case, at some point, there has most likely been an hda6, which was deleted and then that space was used to make partitions hda8, 9, and 10.... in the example below, I'm referring from beginning of the drive (win_c) to the end, in case of doubt, just check the cylinder definition)
Partition | mount point | file system type | size
hda1 /mnt/win_c fat32 ~5GB
hda5 / ext3 ~5GB
hda6 swap linux swap ~100MB up to 512MB; traditionally 2x the size of your RAM memory, nowadays not necessary to make it so large; actually, if you use your linux system in a way that it really needs 200MB of swap, you're doing such heavy things that a memory upgrade is definitely a thing to consider...
hda7 /home ext3
hda8 /mnt/win_d fat32

You just divide the remaining space over the last 2 partitions, if you have a 20GB harddisk, you have about 10GB left, so you can do 5GB - 5GB or, if you are certain you are going to use a lot of files both under linux and windows, 3GB for /home and 7GB for /mnt/win_d because you cannot access any linux filesystem when under windows, and under linux you can actually access all fat32 partitions for reading and writing, so you can make a large win_d to be able to pass large files from the linux environment to windows (like ripped cd's or so). NB: if you have less than 128MB, you may consider putting the swap space as hda5 (meaning: before the / (so called 'root'-partition)), because your system may regularly use the swap space (and the closer to the beginning of the drive, the faster it reads and writes...).

Important note! If you create new partitions, they must be formatted so that later the operating system (whichever that is) knows the total size. I recently wasted quite a bit of time of a friend of mine for thinking I could bend the will of the digital universe to my liking. Formatting is necessary before any system can use the partition.

Choose Packages to Install
- for a more or less complete install, just select basically all general groups on the left, and all environments on the right bottom side. Leave out the server stuff, unless you know you want to play with that. Keep in mind that it's really easy to install anything at a later point with the software installer. If you've chosen 'expert install' you get to hand pick extra packages. But any stuff you could pick there, you can also install later. Sit back and relax, or take a break,... on a Duron1GHz system, the software packages install took me more than 15 minutes!

For any server that you have installed, you get to tell if you want it started at boot. It is generally a good idea to switch off ftpd, httpd and such servers that you may have installed to play with, but aren't going to use. You can switch them on later, but they do slow down the boot process.

Root Password
-make sure you don't forget this one, and also: don't make it easy to guess for someone else... (no actual words, or worse: names) If you do forget it, you can actually go through this installation again without installing anything (choose upgrade, then don't select anything), and just choose another root password. Oh, in that case you do have to create the same users that existed on your system.

Adding a User
- it's not over until you click done, at least create one user, you can easily (with graphical menu's) create more after install.

Check Miscellaneous Parameters

Summary

Time Zone Options
- some people have reported problems when selecting that the time on the system is in GMT, also, this would not combine nicely with windows...

Configuring X, the Graphical Server

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Installing Updates from the Internet
- I tried it some time ago, but there weren't any yet (less than one week after 9.0 hit the web). Supposedly security updates. Unless you have a fast internet connection, you may want to skip this step. Also, if you don't have a fast (flatfee continuous) connection, chances are that you're not going to be an easy target anyway (if you're offline, how could they hack your system...)

Installing boot loader and making a boot floppy

- a boot floppy is not a bad idea, in case you do a reinstall of windows for instance, but then you can also restore the bootloader on the harddisk if something were to happen to it, by booting with the first CD (CDROM 1), choosing F1 - and booting into rescue-mode (F1 and type 'rescue' [enter], then select "repair bootloader")

It's Finished!