Figured I'd throw some of my info in.

First off, you don't need a floppy for XOSL - I have a bud who did it using a bootable CD and a ram drive. I can't remember exactly how he did it, but you can google bootable dos CD and ram drive and I'm sure you can find something.

You should have no problems doing all of those OSes on one disk - Windows needs to be on a primary partition, but the Linuxes can get away with being on logical drives (pretty sure, at least), and so can *BSD IIRC. I'm not 100% sure on that, though. :/

The real problem is when you are multibooting older MS OSes.. Then you have to install them, oldest first, and hope you don't have to reload one of them ever (It's possible to hide partitions to where you can do it, IIRC, but that's a hassle and a half).

TY for responses. Actually, I not only re-reviewed tldp docs on GRUB, but also re-reviewed the following LILO and multiOS boot docs
LILO
Linux+WinNT Only
3-OS Multiboot
Linux+NT-Loader

Afterwards, tried re-installing DOS+Win98+WinNT.
The last two tldp howto's above are actually somewhat misleading and outdated.
Linux's fdisk can be used perfectly well as the first steps for partitioning, using either a bootable floppy or bootable CD. One drive only is to be used for OS-booting and its mbr can remain within the first partition of this sole drive perfectly well -- /dev/hda1 using lilo's 'boot=/dev/hda' entry in /etc/lilo.conf
Currently have an ext2/fdisk-type-83 partition on hda1 (or hd0,0 according to GRUB) for /<root>. This is the way I wish, in order that the arcane BIOS issue w/ cylinders greater than 1024 is a non-issue for lilo. Also, WinNT's bootloader, NTLDR, has no problem loading Win98's COMMAND.COM and it easily runs Win98, even in hda2 as I have already seen.

The real issue is that WIn98's COMMAND.COM overwrites DOS's COMMAND.COM within THE SAME FAT16 PARTITION!!!

Desired partitioning scheme for hda (e.g., one 20GB drive w/ 256MB RAM) is the following :
/dev/hda1 (a.k.a. hd0,0) ext2/type-83 ~250MB
(to contain /boot w lilo or GRUB mbr management)
/dev/hda2 (hd0,1) fat16/type-6 1023MB
---> DOS COMMAND.COM bootable
---> Win98 COMMAND.COM bootable
---> WinNT NTLDR bootable
/dev/hda3 (hd0,2) fat32/type-b 4GB+
(Win98 'program files' and data)
/dev/hda4 Extended partition
/dev/hda5 ntfs/type-7 4GB+
(WinNT 'program files' and data)
/dev/hda6 swap/type-82 256MB
...
then on consecutive hda/hd0 partitions onwards, /tmp, /var, /usr, /home, ... etcetera for Linux only.
Note that each of the three fat16 OS's are indeed given a primary partition, and that each of these OS's have been already tested to single boot in this primary partition (i.e., as the sole bootloader in this partition!)

Wow, this thread is old. Anyway, I did get it working for quite a while, I had Win2K, WinXP, Gentoo, Suse 8.2, Redhat EL WS beta, Redhat 9, and Mandrake 9 all installed at once. It wasn't even that big of a hassle. I played with grub quite a bit and got things to work. I then tried to use the same home filesystem for all of the OSes (well Linux ones) and that almost worked. Sometimes .bashrc or .profile settings needed if statements depending on what type of OS it was, but for the most part it worked. Since then, I just run suse 9.1 and I have a seperate box for my Winblows needs.

MIKE

That's why Iomega and other hardware makers are now selling USB floppy drives ! Who'd have believed it ?

Okay. While I don't understand why you want to assemble the three loaders in a single partition (while the systems are elsewhere) you should be able to. Two possibilities:

a. Put the COMMAND.COMs in (sub)-directories.
b. Rename (one or both of) them, e.g. "Win98-COMMAND.COM "

Then use NT-loader to call the COMMAND.COMs or experiment to give GRUB the correct strings with path and filename to load the COMMAND.COMs. (I do it with NT-loader, so have no direct experience).

Out of interest, mastahnke, what order did you install the OSs in, if you can recall?
Because I wanted to do a similar thing at one time.