Triple boot 98, XP and RHL9
 

I have always had 98 & XP dual booted with no problem. I installed RHL9 and put grub in my boot partition, I can only boot to linux with boot disk. I followed directions to add RHL9 to boot.ini from http://www.linuxgazette.com . I get the option in NT loader for RHL9, I choose it but the system halts after screen goes blank with just a flashing cursor.

What could I be doing wrong? I have checked grub.config and references appear to be correct.

Greg

I always rely on the old tried and true. The linux boot loaders work just fine. Try one out.

hang on...You installed GRUB, but your boot screen is NT loader? GRUB should get rid of any other boot loaders, leaving you with a GRUB menu when you boot. Try installing GRUB again, and make sure you install it on the MBR of the first drive.

What artical are you refering to in your post? I couldn't find it quickly.

Place the boot loader in the MBR instead of the /boot and let it point to the windows boot loader for NT. Or let it point to both the 98 OS and the NT OS like we normally do.

Your about the forth person i have heard asking how to change the windows boot.ini file in the last 48 hours and I would like to find were everyone is getting this advice. If its good I'd like to learn it and if its bad I'd like to see why.

If you choose to install grub or lilo on the first drive instead of MBR, you will get the windows loader first, if you install on the MBR you get the GRUB loader first, I was told that it was better and safer to not to install on MBR. While this may or may not be, I chose to reinstall on MBR and I couldn't configure it to work through windows loader.

Thanks for your help!

Greg

If you have reinstalled GRUB on the MBR, you shouldn't have your windows loader any more. Therefore, you shouldn't have to configure GRUB through your windows loader

yes I have XP and 98 installed so if I choose windows through GRUB, I get the windows boot loader with choice of 98 or XP. And sorry I should have said "I installed GRUB on MBR as I couldnt configue windows boot loader.

Greg

Ah, right. I get it :). Although I think it would be simpler to set up GRUB to boot all three so you don't need to go through two layers whenever you want windows. Its pretty easy to set up GRUB to do that, but I'm not really sure how to remove the Windows boot loader, so unless you know how to do that, it might be safer just to stick with your current configuration.

I have the same triple boot with Win98, WinXP and Mandrake Linux. I had RedHat, but changed to Mandrake when RedHat dropped their Desktop support.
With either Linux it was simple: Install Win98 first, as it is blind to all other OS's.. then install WinXP which will take over the MBR to boot both Windows versions... then Linux with Grub or LILO installed to the MBR. I've done this several times with no problems. The Linux bootloader will give two options (Linux or Windows), then WinXP's loader will give two options (WinXP or Win98). Configuring the Windows loader to allow booting all three from the first option list in Grub or LILO may be a teeny bit more elegant and a little less hassle, but not enough for me to go to that effort. Since I started using Linux, I only run Win98 or WinXP for games.
While tinkering around with these multiple boot configurations (once had Win98, WinXP, Mandrake, Slackware and WinXP again (yes, WinXP will install more than once!)), I did run into a problem with the Windows loader. It wouldn't load, then stated that the hal.dll file was missing (it isn't really missing!). This turns out to be a common occurrence with multiple boot with WinXP, fixed by booting to the WinXP disk then using boot re-configuration options.