Hey everyone
I have this all set up on a spare cd of mine. so let me explain my details.

I Have a machine with Windows 2k and red hat 8 installed. I am currently using Grub as my boot loader (.92 i think) I just got my mandrake 9.2 Cd set with update cd and i am ready to install it.

I have win2k and RH8 on a hard drive set to master, i have a second hard drive that will be set to slave for mandrake.

Now i would like to know how is the best way to go about triple booting this? I would also know the best way to revert back to my red hat win 2k setup incase mandrake isn't all its cracked up to be. I know i can uninstall mdk by just f-disking the second drive but how do i get the boot loader back to just showing 2k and RH? I assume i would install Lilo on the primary MBR of the master HD. and i can f-disk MBR to remove lilo if mandrake doesnt agree with my system, but how can i get grub back on there? Thanks for any help.

DON'T install lilo on master mbr! Either install it on /dev/hdb1 and chain-load it or don't install it at all, and instead edit your RH /boot/grub/menu.lst to direcly boot the kernel.
Grub is great in that it allows boot-time reconfiguration, so if you make a mistake don't panic. It might be a good idea to print out grub manpage or a grub howto (there are some good ones online)
Of course it's a good habit to copy the old menu.lst to a safe place before editing.
A tip: unless it deeply changed since 9.0, mkd is is like win9x: installing and removing software it becomes bigger and slower. Having /home on it's own partition may prove useful if you want to nuke. U can even share home between mkd and rh (I share it among deb, slack and bsd)

so you would suggest that i edit my grub config to boot to mandrake as well as rh and win2k. Would i install mdk and then make these changes. I will also post this thread at the general board. I realize the distro place wasnt the best place to put it

while you are in time, if your disk is one of those nowdays 40+Gb, consider keeping a 2GB partition unused: maybe u'll want to try debian, or even bsd, someday

i could also install grub when i install mdk. The main concern i have is if i do that and i later choose to remove mdk and just use RH and 2k how can i get the mdk entry off my boot loader. Would i just remove it in the config files?

so i have my grub.conf file open and it looks like this

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
# root (hd0,5)
# kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda8
# initrd /initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,5)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-14)
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.4.18-14.img
title DOS
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1


so the question is could i just install mdk 9.2 on the second HD without installing any boot loader then booting to red hat and editiong that file to add MDK, then i could boot to all thee OS's and if i wanted to whipe off mdk it wouldnt be hard to revert my boot loader back to what it is now. Can someone let me know if that would work? And offer any tips to what i would have to add? It kind of reminds me of the boot.ini file of windows but i dont really understand it.

been doing some looking on google and havnt really got anywhere.

Anyone have a idea of what process i would need to follow?

The grub entry would be similar to this:

title Mandrake 9.2
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz ro root=/dev/hdb1 <--check for actual kernel name
initrd /initrd-whatever.img <--and initrd (if needed)

as an alternative, you can add this to grub.conf:

title mandrake
root (hd1,0)
chainloader +1

and then install lilo with no multiboot on hdb1 to boot mdk.
i would not recommend having more than one instance of grub, it (and you) can get confused: unlike lilo, which hard-codes configuration, grub searches config file at boot time, stopping at the first one it finds.

NOTE: you can modify your grub.conf even before installing the new os, that will not hurt nor hang.

This is grub home page:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub
there are also many grub-howto on the net

thanks, i got mandrake installed and the boot loader edited.

What I like to do with my 3 partition's is because I like to play with different distro's I keep XP /hda Mandrake 9.2 /hda3 and the third I use for a variety, right now it houses SuSE 9 but before that it was Fedora , yellow dog , Morphix ect.
Since I'm more familiar with lilo I let Madrake's lilo write to the MBR and just add the lines:
" other=/dev/hdax" # x being the third distro's root partition mine is /hda6
label="Linux"
And I can add and subtract distr's all day long without touching any thing already installed.
Advice I got on this board

sweet i did something similar to that with grub thanks to friendly foke at the #mandrake and #redhat rooms on freenode IRC