Guys, help me out here thought this would be easy but its kicking my butt.

Trying to install Win2K , XP and Redhat 8.0 on my Dell Inspiron Laptop.

Hard Drive is 10 Gig so this is how I partiioned it:

3.2 (Primary Partition) --- Win 2K (NTFS)

Extended Partition

2G (Logical Drive in extended Partition) Win XP (NTFS)

300MB (Logical Drive in Extended Partition) Share space for all 3 OSes (Fat 16)

4.1 G (Left as unpartitioned for Red hat 8.0 with ext3fs file system)

I installed the Oses in that order, Win 2k, then XP and then RH8.0 and and installed Grub on MBR. It booted correctly for the first time and shows Rh 8.0 and Dos.. when you select Dos then it displays the Win 2k and XP.

I tried changing my grub.conf to display all 3 Oses on Grub menu so i didnt have to descend into another Boot loader to get to windows.

I selected Win 2k booted up and and on reboot the whole bloody thing blew up saying it couldnt find boot partitions.

When I used fdisk to look on the HDD the linux partitions were all gone. I am like what the hell happened here. Has anyone done this. Further more how can effectively get GRUB to boot all 3 oses? I have read a lot of Howtos but most of them seem to have XP, linux and Win 98 /Me but I want 2K, XP and Linux...


Help Please!!!!

well you should have left it the way it was

ntloader will handle xp and win2k

Thanks,

I know this But I don't want any Windows boot manager handling which OS I boot.

I know its possible to have Grub boot all the Oses directly though. Just read something on using the force LBA32 option if the /boot partition is above the 1024 cylinder which in this case it is. since my /boot partition is in the extended Partition or rather (hd0,4). Any thoughts?

I don't think there is any difference in XP and 2k, because I have both of them that dual boot the same way, but when nt was installed, and it saw the other version of nt and so it basically took over the boot sector and allows you to boot both. So I think you only have one boot sector.

I could be wrong