lilo boots all - Win98, Win98se, WinNT, Win2k, potato, BeOS
On my Pentium PC I have lilo booting potato, win98, win98se, winnt, win2k,
and beos. All are running on their native file systems, with NT and 2k on
NTFS partitions (no FAT16 nonsense), win98x on FAT16, potato on ext2, beos
on befs. Each OS is on a 2GB partition. I have some other NTFS partitions
for data, using two 20GB drives.
Once you get your versions of Windows installed as you like them, install
lilo placing it in the mbr (the default). This will temporarily disable
Windows booting. You could follow the how-to that offers the approach of
using Windows ntldr to boot to lilo (rather than the reverse), but I think
that is less desirable. The next step is to regain access to ntldr from
lilo.
You touch up lilo.conf to point to Windows as an "other" boot OS using the
same syntax as documented for multiboot to dos. After that lilo should put
you into ntldr when asked and you should see the usual Windows OS boot
selector screen. From lilo the ntldr selection of Win98 should boot now. If
ntldr is on /hdb you will need some extra magic using the little known map
directive in lilo.conf to swap drives.
If Win98 boots fine but you get an ntoskernel missing error or some such
when trying to boot NT the answer is that you need to bump up the partition
number in c:/boot.ini (which you can edit from Win98). The reason is when a
primary partition is installed later (such as for Linux) it can bump the
logical partitions up a number. NT will install as a logical partition in an
extended partition.
The sequence I followed was to install all Windows operating systems first,
then linux, then BeOS.
I'd never used lilo before this month. Did this setup as my first multiboot
install. That lilo works so well is really AWESOME!
Cheers,
Robin
rower@movieeditor.com
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