My family have windows 98 on their primary master and I want to add a hard drive with linux on it, but not sure how the boot loaders will work.

I'm assuming I should:
Add the hard drive as primary slave (only one left), and boot linux on it.
Write lilo to the master boot record to boot:

boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hdb1
...etc.

image=/boot/vmlinuz
...etc.

other=/dev/hda1
label=win

...and it will work, but I don't know.

I have looked, but I don't fully understand the "table" option.

We can't back up, so it's important I know it will work or I am off to the guillotine.

I believe lilo backs up the loader it replaces to a /boot/*.b file, so this may not be a big risk, I just copy it back if something goes wrong.

I've got rescue disks for both, so I shouldn't have too much of a panic if the boot loaders don't work.

I've done my research, so if I'm right, please confirm that I haven't missed something!

As far I see, it should work that way.

I have almost the same setup on my own computer.

Thanks, thats all I needed. I'll be careful though, as things happen.