I have HP pavilion 722k machine. I tried installing Red hat 8.0 on it but the HP recovery overwrote the LILO config as soon as I rebooted the machine. How can I possibly have both windows XP and Red hat 8.0 on my machine.

No problem, just some extra waork! I hope, you created a boot floppy at installation time for linux. If not - even better, you install RH8 again and make sure you have a boot diskette and you use grub and allow it to write to the MBR. If you have a boot diskette, boot into RH8.0 and find out (info grub) how to write the MBR again with the linux-grub boot-block Either way, you recover your grub boot block for linux. Next you copy it into your c: drive and include it as the "Linux" option into your boot.ini. Be creative! RH8.0 doesn't support NTFS file system with the standard installation. It still requires to rebuild the kernel, with is not so nice; at least it gives you a lot of chances for mistakes. The easier way is, to have a small FAT32 partition somewhere as a transfer filesystem. What you need to copy into your C: drive. Assuming, your fat32 partition is on /dev/hda5, you need to mount it: mkdir /mnt/hda5 mount /dev/hda5 /mnt/hda5 now copy the MBR into it: dd if=/dev/hda count=1 of=/mnt/hda5/bootsect.lnx Next you transfer it into your C: top directory. You do this from WinXP. Next you have to edit on C: the file boot.ini to look like this: [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect c:\bootsect.lnx="Linux" Now you can boot either way.