Greetings!

Using the convention of HD0 as the "main drive" where the system boots from, I have Lilo on the MBR with XP-Pro (using NTFS) on HD0-1,2,3, Mandrake on HD0-5,6,7,8, and Fedora Core 2 on HD0-9,10,11,12 -- this drive is 160 G.

I just replaced a failing HD1 with a new 80 G drive and would like to put Windows 98 SE on it, as well as a 2-3 Linux Distros. I've already partitioned the drive with three primary Fat32 partitions for Windows, and will use the remaining space in an extended partition divided up for the Linux distros.

Additionally, I have an existing 12 G drive as HD2 on which I have an HD installation of Knoppix (HD2-2 with HD2-1 as linux-swap), along with a Fat32 partition (HD2-3) for sharing data between Linux and Windows.

That's the setup--here's the question:

How to install Windows 98 on HD1 (the 80 G drive I just installed and formatted) without writing over the MBR on HD0 and mucking up Lilo, etc.? I suspect there's a way to do this, but I'm something of a "newbie" with these things, so I'm counting on you good people to help keep me from trashing my system.

Hopefully I've given you enough information, but if not, please feel free message me or reply in this forum.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide me.

One love!

Xochipilli

Well, it is possible. The question is are you willing to use this system (it looks like this is your main sytem) to try?

I have not really done this, but seen posts where users have been able to do it.

I would first, back up my important data and make one win XP AND one Mandrake (or whatever the distro is that you are using lilo from) boot floppy disk, to recover from any problems.

It looks like you have experience with lilo, so that you can add entries to lilo. This would be necessary, since you are installing OS' post install of the current lilo distro and you will want to add win 98 and others (installed to hdd-1 and 2) after the fact. So, you will be using lilo as the bootloader.

Again, make sure that you are sure about doing this. There are no absolutes with this method.

The technique involves setting the jumper pins on the replacement hard drive to primary master and disconnecting the other drives. You would then install Win 98 to the drive, shut down the system when you are satisfied with the results, change the jumper on the drive back to primary slave (or whatever it is in your system), reconnect the other drives correctly, boot into Mandrake and edit lilo to find win 98 on the primary slave.

Again, I would do a google search on this and read up on the technique and see if you want to chance it on this system.

To give you an idea of the issues, look at this article

Maybe someone else has actually tried this before and has more specifics.

I had Win 98 previously installed on my second hard drive (formally assigned to primary master) and was able to boot it by changing the bios to boot from hdd 0 to hdd 1, since all the registry entries and such were set to c: as the primary master. This was a pain to do each time (chnaging it back and forth), but it worked.

Originally posted by Xochipilli2012:


The problem w/ this scenario is that all MSFT OS need to have their boot files on the primary master. Short of resetting the BIOS focus (re:primary master) w/ each boot, you need to put some effort into this proposed config.

You might load 98 as described (i.e set the BIOS to recognize the 80 as the primary master) and then move the XP boot files to that root directory. Reconfigure Lilo and then run it..

Other Solution: make temporarly HD1 to HD0 and HD0 to HD1 (jumper Slave to master and vv.).

Sorry, r3j3s, I have to disagree.
M$FT want to be on the first Harddisk, that's true but the first Harddisk is not necessarily the primary master - confusing, eh ?
With LILO (or even GRUB) you can define which Disk will be seen by M$FT to be the first.
For LILO the sequence is:

map-drive = 0x80
to = 0x81
map-drive = 0x81
to = 0x80

This should be part of your Windows Boot section in LILO and it exchanges the first Harddisk with the second.
The benefit is that you can install M$FT's chaos on the second Harddisk as danleff described and you will not loose your LILO or GRUB boot-installation (MBR) as otherwise usual.
So this way of installing WinX onto the second Harddisk is my preferred one since quite a while.

PS
The comparable command for GRUB is:
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)

have a lot of fun