I had the problem of buying a HP Pavilion with XP pre-installed. I wanted to install 98SE to solve some compatibility issues, and I also wanted to install Mandrake. So I added a second HD to accommodate all this.
The ideal way to solve the XP/98 issue would be to uninstall XP install 98 and re-install XP. But HP does not supply any installation media, just a hidden "restore partition" which only contains an image of the factory setup. So that was out. After seeking advice, I got a variety of answers that involved disconnecting drives, switching the bios boot sequence, etc. But I figured there must be an easier way. What I ended up doing was, as follows: I created a bootable FAT32 partition on the 2nd HD, leaving the 1st HD entirely NTFS, downloaded a 98se boot disk from bootdisks.com. Then I copied all the bootdisk files to that partition. Then I installed Mandrake and made sure that the 98 partition was included in lilo.config. I booted into the 98 partition, slapped in the 98 CD and installed 98se. When the install finished...everything worked( As far as booting is concerned still need some updated drivers for newer hardware). Lilo comes up will boot whatever system you want. This is what worked for me, no guarantee it will work for everyone. It seems like it should also work with grub, both lilo and grub seem to make each partition belive that they are boot partition. Oh yeah, just to be safe I did do a complete drive image backup before I started the 98 install. Richard *********************************************************************** <Richard Hackwith ><Sacramento CA><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ***********************************************************************
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