I need some advice from some of you triple booters. I am now running Mandrake 8.0 and windows 95 on two seperate hard drives as a dual boot system. As it stands when I boot up I receive the linux options screen letting me decide what operating sytem to choose. I have just installed a third hard drive and my intentions are to load Windows 2000. How do I create a triple boot system between the three operating systems. My thinking is that when I load 2000 it will overide the linux boot record and create a dual boot between 95 and 2000. Then when I want to run linux I can boot it up from the boot disk? Can someone let me know in simple terms what I need to do. I sure would appreciate it. I am new to the triple boot thing.

If you are using a fairly recent machine, you may try what I did. I have Linux, NT and Win98 one one machine. I have no problems installing Linux to one drive as it does not seem to destroy other installations. Windows, however may do just as you fear. I install to a single disk at a time. Disconnect the other drives. When you boot, use the SETUP (bios) as your machine is powering up and you can pick and chose which drive you will boot. I have had trouble with one machine in that it did not like being moved from the primary to the secondary IDE channel. Other than that, I've had good luck with up to three OSs on a machine for quite a while. Wish me luck. I'm going to try and use Linux on a Mac. I've never done anything Mac before but it seems like something I want to try. Good luck with your triple boot. Victor, P.S. I tried one of those TRIOS devices which is supposed to isolate drives for booting. It never worked for me. VA

Also, If you do as victor suggested, you could boot into Linux, edit lilo.conf to have options for Windows/Linux, by adding options for the correct device (ex: /dev/hda1). Also, I believe there is an option for setting up LILO from drakconf. I am at a Windows computer right now, so I can't tell you the exact syntax, but if you need it, feel free to e-mail me. Good Luck. Greg

Im currently running, win98 win2k and mandrake 8.1 on 1 harddrive with no problems. I would suggest installing win2k without your other hdd plugged in, then get a boot managing program to detect your os's and write the MBR accordingly. I've never done it with a second hdd so im unsure, if ure willing to reinstall all os's I would suggest installing win95, then win2k then linux as linux won't kill your other operating systems.

First, try to save your Linux record. You can find the root partition with the command rdev and then you can copy the bootsector of this partition into a file with the following command: dd if=/dev/hdb1 bs=512 count=1 of=/boot/bootsec.lin "/dev/hdb1" has to be replaced by YOUR root partition (e.g. result of rdev). But be careful by using the dd command, it can cause heavy damage to your installation. If this succeeds, copy the /boot/bootsec.lin to a Win/DOS formatted floppy disk. When installing Win2000 or NT I suppose it will install automatically a boot menu for choice between Win2000 and Win95. If so, boot Win2000, make the boot.ini (which should be found in the boot disk (C:?) of Win200 read-writeable and open it. At the end, at the line C:\bootsec.lin="Linux", save the file and close it again. Now copy the bootsec.lin file (which you copied to a diskette under Linux) to C:\ and simply reboot your system. The Windows 2000 loader should show now Windows 2000, Windoes 95 and Linux. Scroll to the "Linux" option, hit enter and if everything worked fine, windows reads out bootsec.lin which points to the root partition of your Linux system.

Hey Paul, that's pretty sharp. Likewise, instead of writing lilo to the hdb1 you can let lilo write the mbr when installing linux after installing w95/98/me/xp and wnt/2000. Then edit your /etc/lilo.conf file and add at the bottom a couple of lines like: other=/dev/hda1 optional label=windows pointing to hda1 with an appropriate label (where the ntldr resides and am assuming). Rerun lilo -v -v to rewrite your changes to the mbr. You will see the linux loader first that way when you boot before you see the ntldr if you choose windows. Make sure your map= , boot= , message= , install= , root= , etc. lines are correct. Otherwise you will be booting off of your your rescue disk later and mounting your root under /mnt/sysimage to repair the changes you made to lilo.conf.

ive got a athlon with a kyro2 video card right the video card is 64mg and i carnt find any linux drivers for it. Also i have win98 on my single hdd and i want to know how to get linux to dual boot on my machine with one hdd is it posable?