I read, in a tutorial, that linux was not able to be installed beyond the 4 or 5 gb sector on a hard drive. Is this true for Red Hat Linux 7.3? (sorry, I know that this is a dumb question but I can't afford to test this out just yet.) What I want to do is have linux dual boot with Windos XP and Windows 98 on a 40gb HDD. (20gb partition for XP and 10gb for each of the other two OS's.)

I installed Redhat 7.3 (Valhalla) with GRUB. I installed grub to MBR (master boot record) Linux was on my first harddrive (with XP, but different partition ofcourse) and i left 15Gb for the XP and 5Gb's for linux. In the installation progress, when you get asked about what bootloader do you want to use, i selected grub to be installed to MBR and selected the recognised WinXP partition. After installation the grub showed boot menu correctly, and i could start XP from there.

it should works fine with rh7.3 default boot loader. using bootpart to add linux to nt OS loader would be a good choice if windows is your main OS. you can do this using a program called bootpart

I have written several pages to do this with, take a look at them at the above "DIRECT" link. They have %80 rate of success. I have instructions for LILO and for GRUB. I just put RH7.3 on my laptop with the first 15 to XP 500 for fat32 (fileshare) and the other 4 for RH7.3. Did'nt have to think just installed using Grub.

I Have a delldimension 8200 with 40Gb of hardisk with xp pre intalled and Nvidia Geforce4 Graphics card. This is how I got it working after a bunch of installations 1) ReInstalled Xp in 20Gb of hardisk with NTFS 2) Loaded RH7.3 in the rest of my hardisk space allowing the linux to partition the hardisk. It doesn't matter if /boot is not in the first 1024 cylinders 3)Choose lilo or grub as your bootloader and install in /boot and not in MBR. 4) Create a boot disk, most important. 5)Important choose a text login instead of graphical, coz you would not be able to start xserver.(GeForce has problem) 6)Boot to linux using your floppy. 7)Get the driver files from Nvidia and install them. Nvidia_kernel.xxx.i686.rpm Nvidia_GLx.xxxxx.i386.rpm I got the binaries and they worked just fine with me. You can get the source files and compile them too. 8)edit the /etc/XFree86-4 replace driver "nv" with "nvidia" Make sure you have Load "glx" delete the lines Load "dri" Load "GLcore" 9) Startx should bring up the xserver 10) To make it dual boot from windows now you need to edit lilo (even if you are using Grub as bootloader) a) copy lilo.conf.anaconda to lilo.conf b)edit lilo.conf c)comment out linear if you have that line d) and add lba32 which forces it beyond 1024 cylinders. 11) run lilo -v and it will upadate the boot and create a new boot record called boot.xxx, where xxx is a number 12) copy that boot record by doing dd if=/boot/boot.xxx of=bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 copy that onto a floppy mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy cp bootsect.lnx /mnt/floppy 13. Exit from Linux and boot into xp. copy bootsect.lnx to c:\ 14. edit boot.ini ( this my be invisible if you do a directory listing) 15. add c:\bootsect.lnx="Linux" at the end of the line. Save and exit and you should be ready. Now when you reboot, it should show both xp and linux options and hopefully everything should work fine. If you want to make a disk that could be seen by both xp and linux create an fat16 partition which can be seen by both OS.