Greetings:
I apologize for mentioning the evil empire's OS here, but I started with it and like to keep old friends around. I normally dual boot WinME on /dev/hda1 and my current linux kernel on some other primary partition on the same disk. This has always worked first try.

Sometimes I do real time stuff that is likely to corrupt everything in MSDOS. I'd rather have it booted stand alone rather than in a DOS box under Win9x. I've read the man pages for lilo.conf and it talks about a 'master-boot' option which should make the booted system think its on the first partition even when its not. I can't get this to work. Anyone doing this? I'd love to see a sample lilo.conf file that works! What I want is three options {WinME, MSDOS, Linux} each on its own partition.

I tried it on two different disks. Must have done something slightly different on them, but on one it just hangs booting into WinME on /dev/hda1. In the other configuration it always boots /dev/hda1 for both the DOS menu options even though I have the different partitions correctly specified. Seems to make some difference which partition I have set as active, but that's part of what I though master-boot overrode? Any thoughts? Thanks.

Here is an example you can adapt to your needs. Don't forget to run /sbin/lilo after making changes to your lilo config.
http://www.control-escape.com/linux/lilo-cfg.html

I have that setup on my laptop right now with msdos, linux, winxp, and recovery console. However, I use grub and grub isn't installed to the mbr though. Procedure would be as follows (from memory): install dos first, then install windows, install linux last. After installing linux, you can install lilo to the mbr and it should pick up dos and windows at least. I usually install lilo to the root partition of my linux install and then dd the first 512 bytes to a file on the dos partition. Then I edit the ntloader to pick up the lilo bootfile so I can boot all 3 OSes.