Hi !
Hopefully I can shovel some light on this topic.
I have even a triple boot on my machine booting W98 / BeOS and RedHat 5.2.
What I did was the following using a single harddrive (after i ruined my
whole system in order of unknowledge) :
1) The harddrive(s) are blank, no partitions, nothing at all.
2) Started the W98-Installation process with partitioning the drive PARTLY
!!! with the Dos-fdisk, which i did like this:
a) Create a primary DOS partition for W98 to boot from, if one is using
one harddrive, don't give it all the space available (coz space is needed
for the OS too).
b) Create an extended DOS partition - if wanted - and same here, don't
give it all the available space.
c) Create one or more logical drives in the extended DOS partition, if one
wants to install BeOS create a logical drive which gives BeOS enough space,
the BeOS setup will change the partition later by itself whitout any problem.
d) If you don't want to install BeOS, skip part c) ;)
3) Boot W98 from CD-ROM or floppy and install the system to the primary
DOS-partition, format all the created drives.
4) If one wants to install BeOS, do it now as described in the manual. For
the case that someone wants to have Os/2 or some other OS installed too, i
think it should work if one creates just a second primary partition with
the OS-Installation program, if possible - have no experience with other OS
than the those mentioned above.
5) Now install Linux. Linux fdisk or diskdruid are intelligent enough to
see that there is still space for installing a swap partition and at least
one ext2 partition. I used diskdruid as it pops up in the installation
process of my RedHat 5.2. I created the swap partition first and then gave
all the left space to one ext2 partition. During the installation process
lilo can be setup iirc, or just do it after the install and create the
necessary entries for W98 and in my case also for BeOS and install lilo on
the MBR of the first harddrive (don't panic, it works and if not use the
W98 bootdisk and run fduisk /mbr, then W98 writes its original MBR back to
the drive and one can boot into W98). Now after reboot the lilo prompt
should show up and with simply typing in the boot label lilo should load
the desired OS. If this fails boot into linux with the linux CD or linux
boot floppy and setup the lilo settings correctly (either with using
linuxconf or Yast if one uses SuSE or just by hand with editing the
lilo.conf, don't forget to rerun lilo !)
6.) After this any system should be able to be booted by lilo, i found out
that the BeOS bootmanager is too dumb to boot a linux kernel, so rather use
lilo and keep up with a simple prompt than with a less featured colourful
bootmanager screen.
This works for W95 as well and i guess for any MS-OS too. I can defrag my
W98 and format drives, i can mess up my linux and stare at my BeOS without
any problem, all systems run smoothly and can be booted without any
problem. No system interferes with each other or messes sth up or blows up
my monitor, hehehe. Even reinstalls don't cause any problems.
I hope that this rather long description helps a bit to solve the
problem. Basically one system after another is installed to unused disk
space, so that basically even four OS can coexist on one harddrive - and
even more if one uses two or more drives ??
Greez
Dave
>Does this problem occur with Red hat 6.0?
>
>I am going to creat dual-boot with Win98 and Red Hat Linux 6.0 or Mandrake
>Linux 5.3
>Should I woory about having the same problems as some of yuou have with the
>defrag?
>
