Hey guys, I've been digging through various forums and trying to piece together the optimal way to set up my win98/Slack9 dual boot. My brain is quickly turning to mush with all of the bits and pieces of other threads that relate to my configuration.. one person says 'make a boot drive' and the next says 'no, you don't need one' etc. I figured the easiest way to get this done was to ask directly... so here she goes..

When I originally dove into the world of Linux and installed Slackware, I did it with the intention of setting up LILO and booting back to a FAT32 partition afterwards to install Win98 again. I've been very happy with Slackware, and even though I've invested a considerable amount of time into configuring and tweaking it, I'm having issues getting Win98 to install and work correctly on another partition. I've read that it's better to install Windows first, then install Linux, so... I figure the most effective way to approach this situation is probably just to start from scratch and do it all the right way and learn in the process. If not, I would love to know what I'm doing wrong!

Q1: Setting up the partitions
- I have 1 40GB Maxtor HDD to slice up into Windows/Linux
- This is how I've got it set up right now:

- HDA1 - Primary - FAT32 - Active/Bootable - 3.0 GB
- HDA2 - Primary - Linux Swap - 500 MB
- HDA3 - Extended - 36.5 GB
-----------------------------------------------------
- HDA5 - Linux Root - EXT2 - Active/Bootable - 9.0 GB
- HDA6 - Windows Misc - FAT32 - 5.0 GB
- HDA7 - Windows Misc - FAT32 - 10.0 GB
- HDA8 - Windows Misc - FAT32 - 12.5 GB

I'm not sure if I have it set up for optimal performance, but Slackware seems to run fine like this. I booted to a Win98 boot disk and did a Win98 install last night on HDA1, and it was all looking fine until I reinstalled LILO and booted into Slack just to make sure it was still intact. When I rebooted and chose Win98 from LILO, it booted up okay but it no longer detected the 3 Misc windows drives OR my CDROMS all of a sudden... it was just C: and that was all. I also noticed before installing Windows that the MSDOS FDISK could not read the Logical Drives in the Extended partition (made all the partitions using Linux FDISK) but Windows seemed to read them fine until the above mentioned point. So I figured I did something wrong... which brings me to my next question.

Q2: LILO and Active Drives (MBR vs Superblock)
The only way I've been successful in getting LILO to work is by installing it to the MBR... and that's the only thing that I did between Windows working and crappin out (Win98 re-wrote the MBR during the install, and everything was peachy until I booted to my linux bootdisk and reinstalled LILO.)

With LILO in the MBR, the bootable/active flag on the partitions don't seem to matter... and I've been trying to figure out how to get LILO to work from the superblock without any luck. I don't know if LILO being in the MBR actually had anything to do with this freak Windows incident, so I'm going to attempt to boot back to my Win98 Boot disk and format/reinstall my Windows drive again and see what happens while I wait (and hope) for a reply and a little direction as to getting things set up correctly!

I apologize for the long-winded nature of this post, but I wanted to make sure that I mentioned everything in case someone else has had similiar issues or whatnot.

Thanks in advance!
~ Keldivac

Q1: Win98 (95, and ME too, I think) have a problem
in this area. They stop looking for drives when they
encounter something they can't read.

You'd have to put Slack last in the extended to make
this scenario work, and also make swap a logical drive
in the extended partition, again behind the logical DOS
drives.


Q2: Lilo in MBR is fine, I've been using 98 on one of
my other machines in dual-boot for years with no problems.


Cheers,
Tink