well this has been bugging me for so long i suppose i'll start out with my hardware setup (not that its all that necessary for my problem) but ill include it here anyway.

amd 1600xp
128mb ddr
80gb western digital 7200rpm
nvidia TNT2
shuttle ak31 mobo
award bios

starting from a fresh drive i created my partitions using linux cfdisk because of some partularly annoying dos fdisk limitations (it reported my drive as being 2gb and would never report the right sizes) so after some mucking around with that i managed to get a 65gb win98 partition, 5gb free space (to be partioned with win2k's installer) 10gb linux partition and about 500mb of swap.
so it looked roughly like this

hda1 (unused space) hda2 hda3


win2k turned the unused space into an extended partion (hda5)

Now, i want to boot each o/s from lilo. My problem is that win2k installed the bootloader to win98's partition (hda1). when i specify in /etc/lilo.conf other=/dev/hda5 i get an error about ntlder is missing (i copied over ntldr, boot.ini, bootsect.dos and ntdetect.com). although i CAN specify other=/dev/hda1 and get the nt boot menu to choose between win2k and win98 this is not really what i want and ntldr is really ugly. I've tried using dd to copy over the first 512 bytes of hda1 to hda5 with the hope that the bootloader would function. when i tried to select win2k it told me that ntoskrnl.exe could not be found. however, win98 would still boot from both copies of the bootloader. i've messed with a util called bootpart and BOOTPART WINNT BOOT:D: does not seem to do anything at all. and to those who may be interested here's its output.

0 : C:* type=c (Win95 Fat32 LBA), size= 63472783 KB, Lba Pos=63
1 : C: type=5 (Extended), size= 4883760 KB, Lba Pos=126945630
2 : C: type=b (Win95 Fat32), size= 4883728 KB, Lba Pos=126945693
3 : C: type=83 (Linux native), size= 9293602 KB, Lba Pos=136713150
4 : C: type=82 (Linux swap), size= 498015 KB, Lba Pos=155300355

basically i need a way to copy over win2k's bootloader and associated files to hda5 and i can edit boot.ini and do sys C: after that so that both versions of windows boot on their own right from lilo.

any ideas would be appreciated im running out of things to try at this point.
-thanks

Yeah, NTLDR & Lilo is going to battle for which will be the bootloader.

Give these links a shot!

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+NT-Loader.html

and

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+WinNT.html

Hope this helps!

Well those links sort of help but it still doesn't solve my problem of getting the ntldr on the win2k partition (hda5). the first howto explains how to ntldr to boot linux... not really the solution i wanted, the other one explains how to lilo to boot both win2k and win98 but this guy installed them on separate DISKS, and didnt have the issue of win2k putting its bootloader on win98's partition.
i forgot to mention it but im using all fat32 filesystems for the windows stuff just so i can share files between them if i need to. Basically i want the win2k bootloader to ONLY load win2k and i can do sys C: so that the win98 partition will only load windows 98. I've tried the 'recovery' mode with the win2k installer but it doesnt really give any details about what its doing when it 'recovers' the bootsector. thanks for the links though.



:smash:

Sorry the links wasn't more help. The only other thing I can think of is to get NT/2000 to dual boot the windoze OS and then maybe create a Linux boot disk to boot Linux.

Somewhere using 2000, you should be able to create the boot loader in Recovery Console. Then you may have to use the Linux cd disk to create a boot disk.

Good luck!

Smart Boot Manager rocks!!

It's the best I've found, and I've used a few...

I used it to quad-boot between win98, win2k, linux, and DOS. works great!!