I presently have Win 2000 set up on a 8.5 gig hard drive which is running as master. I have Mandrake 9.0 set up on another drive which is running as slave. I want to remove the windows drive from my system and add the win2000 OS to the drive that already has Mandrake on it. I am currently set up to dual boot using LILO which is installed in the MBR on the Windows drive.

My linux drive is a 40 gig., with linux installed on the primary partition which is 10 gigs or so. The rest of the drive is set up as an extended partition which is divided up into 4 DOS partitions.

My question: can I set one of the DOS partitions as "active", then install Windows 2000 on it and then set up LILO to boot from the Windows partition? Or will I have to reformat the entire hard drive and install Windows to the primary partition and then install Mandrake? I would really like to save my Mandrake set up if at all possible.

Yes, but not sure if you can set an extended partition as active. You might have to delete one of the extended partitions and create a primary. You should not have to reformat the entire drive.

When you change your 40g drive to master you will have to change your lilo.conf (be sure to rerun lilo) and fstab files. Use the CD and boot to rescue mode and chroot.

AFAIK you have to install Windows on a primary partition, so delete one logical partition at the beginning or end of the extended partition and make a new primary partition. Set partition type to FAT (or NTFS) and make it active. Then Windows will install itself there. This will overwrite the MBR, so you will need to boot into Linux afterwards with a floppy or cd and then run lilo again.

actually, you can just run the Windows installation program, delete the 4 other partitions not used by Linux and then create a new ntfs partition. Windows will take over the mbr but you can boot into linux and install LILO via rescue mode or by boot floppy and then add the windows entry. You need to do some mapping in the lilo configuration file to fool windows as if it was in the primary partition (i.e. map the linux partition to be second or third and map the windows partition to make it as the first). You just need to do this mappin within the windows part of LILO.

But I do advise placing Windows in the beginning of the drive. I've experience some BSODs with Windows running on the 2nd partition. Not sure if anybody here had the same xperience.

hth.