Hi all. Recently formatted, and I want to dual boot Win98 and Mandrake 9.1 Done it before, but with Windows installed first, and the partitioning done with Partition Magic. This time though, I already have the partitions set up, and Mandrake installed and working. dev/hdb1 is FAT32 and I can do the 'copying files' section of the install. Then, when Windows setup has to reboot, it boots linux (via grub). If I choose Windows from grub, I get a 'Disk I/O error', and I can't complete the installation. I've tried fdisk /mbr and it didn't work, had to reinstall grub. Much appreciated. Thomas

I think Win98 has to sit on the C: drive which means you have to make it the first partition on the first harddrive. Reconnect your drive to make it a master on ide0, adjust /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst that it all points to the correct drive and then install Win98 again - this time on the future c: drive. Boot through grub with the chainloader command.

i do not know grub - lilo has a lilo.conf option which allows Win to run from any drive and, I think, on any primary partition. i would be suprised if grub does not have a similar option.

"grub" is not the problem. The question is, if Win98 can still boot up if it is not running on C: According to my experience it can't.

Unless you are going to use a boot manager that specifically allows you to put Operating systems in any order (this usually involves installing the boot manager first before you place any operating systems on any partitions), you have to install the windows operating systems first. Even if you wanted two windows O/S as well as linux you would have to install them first and linux last

From my experience, windoze doesn't have to be installed on C: and if you want to install windoze after linux, just make a linux boot disk (either with the mkbootdisk command or by editing /etc/lilo.conf to make boot=/dev/fd0 and then running lilo). You can then install windoze and then boot back into linux to reinstall lilo/grub.