Carson

Guys, if you're still looking at this thread, I've made a bit of progress. There's a nifty thing called Boot-US, which is a German boot manager available as a free download. I've got it and it looks like it's what I'm going to use. It's designed for multi Windows-anything + Linux, plus lots of others too. There's a detailed manual on PDF. My intention now is to use the Windows boot manager with this Boot-US, and not use the Linux boots. (I'm told that if you do use Linux, GRUB is gaining popularity over Lilo.) The advantage with Boot-US is that you can set it up on a floppy disk so that NOTHING IS WRITTEN to your hard drive Windows boot files. Later when you're sure, if you want, you can install it to the HD. I'm still brand new at this, but that's the direction I'm going in. Good luck!

I'm brand new to Linux too, dealing with same thing. I use Windows XP Pro on my slave IDE HD; ME on my primary. I used to have 2 XPs, one on slave, one on master; plus the ME. For Windows, you can change IDE pref at the BIOS in 5 or 10 seconds on boot-up, choosing either IDE Drive (0) or (1), which remains default forever until you change it again. An even sweeter method is using US-BOOT's free boot manager with its slick menu; you power up with a floppy and make your choice between IDE drives in 1-2 seconds. --Linux seems less agreeable, but that must be because I'm brand new. I'm changing to Linux because I've heard it does everything better. So far, it's balked at my wanting more than one partition to be bootable. Actually all 6 of my partitions on my 2 IDE HDDs are primary bootable. On Linux Morphix I had to choose between XP and Linux; I suppose because they're so different. (That was no problem between XP and ME, which are also different O/Ss on different kernals.) Anyway, I did create a Linux partition yesterday, but then the Morphix installer died, so I'm working on that today. I notice that XP Pro agreeably recognizes the Linux partition in terms of its existence, size, and Linux identity. --That's not much help to you, but maybe it gives you some background, plus encouragement in knowing you're not alone! Best of luck. :-)