I have red hat 7.2 on my primary master hard drive. There is a blank primary slave drive that I want to install windows 98 on.

Will this be safe? Will installing windows 98 destroy/interfere with anything on my red hat 7.2 system?

windows doesn't like to be slave and it also will wipe out your MBR and overwrite it if you do install it.. having you to reinstall your bootloader to the MBR.. and tricking windows on thinking it is the master drive instead of the slave drive.. which you can do.

-trickykid

What if I temporarily remove my primary master hard drive (which contains red hat 7.2).

Jumper my primary slave to be the new primary master.

Install windows 98.

Put back my primary master (containing red hat 7.2).

Put back my primary slave (now containing windows 98).

Would that work?

yeah..that would work, but you will have to edit your lilo to trick windows thinking it was still the master drive..
something along the lines like this:

other=/dev/hdb1
label=windows
table=/dev/hdb
map-drive=0x80
to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
to=0x80

and also check out www.linuxdoc.org for boot options, lilo.. or whatever your using to load. cause you can do that, it just won't boot into windows without editing your loader..

-trickykid

If anyone else is wondering how to do this, I found an EXCELLENT howto located here http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Linux%...%2BGrub-HOWTO/ (Thanks to trickykid)

This describes how to use grub to install windows 9x, on a system already running linux. (grub is able to fake out windows so the mbr and things are not overwritten).

Word of warning, it only works with 9x, not NT, 2k, or xp as far as I know.

After installing win98 per those instructions, when i boot up Win98se for the first time, there is an error:

Does anyone know what this problem is?

did you remember to make the changes to lilo and write the mbr by running
lilo
at a prompt?

I'm using grub. For some reason I get this error after installing win98se on my primary slave. I already edited grub to do the mappings to fake win98 into thinking its writing to the mbr, but actually only to grub.

i don't know much about grub but you need to make sure grub write to the mbr after you make changes to it

The changes I made to grub.conf are fine. The problem is that I can't get win98se to properly install on my primary slave hard drive. I'm not going to rehash, I describe it above. Does anyone know what the problem is?

I looked at your link. I never saw the mapping of the drives set up that way. If I was going to set it up, I would do it this way:

title win98
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1

<Edit> Moved ' chainloader +1 ' to end of code.

The best way is to back up all of your configs and data, then start over.
At my work I have to install Win98 , Win2k, and RedHat 7.2 on all of the development computers for the software engineering department. The general rule is to install (in this order) Win9x, Win2k, then Linux. If you use Grub you don't have to worry about having the "/boot" partition after the 1024th cylinder. it gives you alot of freedom with your partition structures and better support for large drives.

I have had some problems trying to get Win98 to run on a slave drive. It will get past the first two stages of loading ( Config.sys and Autoexec.bat) and then just freeze, it will start in safe mode though, go figure.

It may be possible to install Win9x second and have it work however with how easy the setup is on RedHat 7.2, why fight with it!!!!

You might want to try a removable HDD system if you don't need to share Data.

--Touchstone

Hey linuxcool, I think the syntax for your mappings are incorrect.

Isn't it like this:

map (hd0,0) (hd1,0)
map (hd1,0) (hd0,0)

The number before the comma is the drive number. The number after the comma is the partition number.

Hey Touchstone, have you ever been able to get win98 to run on a slave drive if red hat 7.2 is on the master drive? Has anyone been able to get that to work?

I could not get it to work. It would boot in safe-mode but the system would hang in normal boot mode. I could never figure out the differance between safe and normal mode that caused the errors at boot. I went so far as to comment out all of the configuration options in Win.ini and System.ini (essentially running Windows in safe-mode) I found out Windows seems to load by relative path in safemode, and in Normal boot it loads from static a device map. Therefore if you load Windows onto the primary partion of your master drive on your first IDE bus, it can't boot if you move the drive to a slave position. I could be wrong but I have never been able to get it to work.

I got that info from here . Go to the bottom of the page to see it. I made a mistake in the code. It should be:

title win98
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
makeactive
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
chainloader +1