Greetings!

Using the convention of HD0 as the "main drive" where the system boots from, I have Lilo on the MBR with XP-Pro (using NTFS) on HD0-1,2,3, Mandrake on HD0-5,6,7,8, and Fedora Core 2 on HD0-9,10,11,12 -- this drive is 160 G.

I just replaced a failing HD1 with a new 80 G drive and would like to put Windows 98 SE on it, as well as a 2-3 Linux Distros. I've already partitioned the drive with three primary Fat32 partitions for Windows, and will use the remaining space in an extended partition divided up for the Linux distros.

Additionally, I have an existing 12 G drive as HD2 on which I have an HD installation of Knoppix (HD2-2 with HD2-1 as linux-swap), along with a Fat32 partition (HD2-3) for sharing data between Linux and Windows.

That's the setup--here's the question:

How to install Windows 98 on HD1 (the 80 G drive I just installed and formatted) without writing over the MBR on HD0 and mucking up Lilo, etc.? I suspect there's a way to do this, but I'm something of a "newbie" with these things, so I'm counting on you good people to help keep me from trashing my system.

Hopefully I've given you enough information, but if not, please feel free message me or reply in this forum.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide me.

One love!

Xochipilli

Well, it's not a graceful solution, but you could switch the master/slave jumper settings on drives 0 and 1, so that win98 installs its bootloader to hd1's MBR. Then you could switch them back when you're done installing, and no one would ever have to know.

Or you could just let 98 overwrite Lilo, then boot from knoppix or something and restore the bootloader from its conf file on hd0.

just a couple ideas...

Hi indeterminate,

I very much appreciate your prompt response and that you gave me two possible approaches. My first impulse was that I wanted to avoid opening the box again so soon after having recently done so to put in the new hard drive. (I resist all the disconnecting and reconnecting of peripherals, made all the more challenging due to where my system is positioned.) So I was initially leaning towards your 2nd solution as it would avoid pulling things apart again and could provide a learning experience with respect to recovering Lilo after Win98 mucks it up. The only thing I would need to do is enough research on the specifics involved so I could proceed with confidence.

However, someone responding to this same question on Linux Forums has informed me that Win98 demands to be on HD0 (the first disk in the system) and suggests an approach similar to your first one, with the addition of somehow having the system re-mapped later to recognize the drive that Win98 is on as the first, even if the physical placement and connections remain the same as how they are now before I get into all of this. I'm not precisely sure where that mapping takes place, so I will follow up with him on that point.

I'm certainly willing to reverse the master/slave relationship between current HD0 and HD1, assuming that gives me access to everything I want to do, but my lazy nature wants to make this a "last resort" in favor of approaches which will give the same result without having to open the box, reset jumpers, etc. Along with this, I'll need a better understanding of the Win98 requirement to be on HD0, and where the mapping for this designation would occur.

Thanks again for your quick response, indeterminate!

Cheers,

Xochipilli

I decided to bit the bullet, disconnect the main drive (where Lilo on MBR, generated by Mandrake's lilo.conf file lives) which has XP, Mandrake, and Fedora, and use a floppy to boot the machine in order to install Win98 on the first partition of the 2nd drive, typically slaved to drive 1.

In that configuration W98 installed fine and booted fine, but I wanted a multi-boot machine and that would require a boot loader. I'd been using Lilo, so I thought I would stick with it.

I reconnected the main drive and configured Lilo to look for Win98 on the first partition of the 2nd drive--but it couldn't load it. So I tried changing the jumpers so the master/slave relationship was reversed, after first writing to the MBR of the 2nd Drive with lilo, including pointers for both XP and W98. This may have been a mistake.

Lilo did load up when the 2nd drive was made the main boot drive, but it did not behave as expected. It pointed to Knoppix on drive 3 ok, but got confused between Win98 and XP. When I chose XP, it wouldn't load anything. When I chose Win98, it loaded XP. So long as I was there, I wanted to see how the drive configuration looked--and I was shocked.

My XP installation has three primary NTFS partions for windows, applications, and data (my documents, etc.) respectively. XP no longer showed the 2nd and 3rd partitions within "My Computer" -- that cinched for me--I wanted no part of something that was going to mess my drive structure up. So I abandoned W98 being installed on my multi-boot computer, as it wasn't launchable from Lilo anyway.

I switched everything back to original configuration and was shocked to find that even when the original main disk was returned to being the boot disk, with the Mandrake-generated Lilo intact, the same drive problem persisted! I could only see the Windows drive and the Fat32 drive/partition that W98 was on. I went into Disk Manager and can see the partitions there--they are "healthy" and appear to be the right sizes. But they cannot be re-named or re-assigned, and the only option available is "delete" which I don't think I should need to do. Also, the Disk Manager showed those partitions as "Unknown Partition" or something like that. I know I should be posting this on an XP forum, but as it might have something to do with Linux or making with the MBR and other boot records using Lilo, I thought it wouldn't hurt, especially as it relates to my process (which has been a complete failure thus far) of trying to install W98 >after< everything else (a "no no" I have discovered), and now the attempted has made my XP largely unusable.

In Summary--I'm giving up on putting W98 on this system--as it isn't worth the trouble. Thanks to some functioning linux distros, I can get online, do research and hopefully find some assistance. I just wish I wasn't so naive or ignorant as I never expected this would turn into so a problem.

Regards everyone, and never try what I did without really know what you are doing first.

Peace.

Xochipilli

Indeterminate:

Someone on another forum (Windows Annoyances) --suggested I try using Linux fdisk to change the partition type, but as this sounded rather risky I backed up new data first, using Linux, and then I made the attempt--but with cfdisk as the man page for fdisk indicated that fdisk is comparitively "buggy" and cfdisk is the better choice. Fairly predictably, attempting to fix the partition table from Linux damaged the one NTFS partition that XP could still read--the one it was installed on, so the whole story was rendered unusable. At that point I decided the simplest course of action was to wipe and reformat those partitions and re-install XP and all my apps again.

While it was lot of extra time that I could have spent doing something else, it was also a good lesson that one needs to be very careful mucking about XP - I just had no idea that temporarily changing the boot order of a harddrive where XP was installed would have created that sort of havoc. Thankfully, none of my Linux distros got hurt, and it was a simple matter to put Lilo back on the MBR once XP was re-installed--so things are just about back to "normal" (and if I want to have W98 and XP on the same machine someday, it will be done the way most commonly recommended: Windows versions get installed from oldest to most recent, followed by Linux. What I was trying to do was a long shot at best.

In any case, this puts that particular thread to rest. Thanks for your input!

Xochipilli