I got it to work, persistance finally paid off.
I followed dual boot mini-HOW-TO to a point, tried program "bootpart", still no-go.
So I followed
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader.html
installed Redhat to IDE0 , the section that talks about copying first 512 bytes of hda1 didn't work for me, but for some reason the this one did:
"Run lilo with a diskette inserted. Now try to boot from the diskette. If your Linux on /dev/hdb1 can't be started, the NT OS loader will also fail to start it. If you see a lot of 01 01 01 01, your root-disk is not accessible. Check whether all your disks are known by the bios. If the floppy boots your Linux partition, you can peel of your boot-sector for the NT OS loader with:
# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
You can keep this diskette as your rescue-diskette just in case your Windows NT installation breaks.
I hope this will help somebody else