Ok i have primary HD (WinXP) and my slave (Linux Mandrake). everything works fine, w/ dual boot. i start comp and i get a blue screen giving me like 4 choices including NT and Mandrake. the rest say like rescue/failsafe or something. anyways when im using one or the other im forced to restart my comp to switch. so how i can just like log off windows and then be given the chioce again of mandrake or windows? and also when im at the menu it says i have like 5 seconds to choose something or it will go default. can i make it so it will never have a time limit? if not then how do i change default? O yea and if it matters im using LILO thanks alot

If I understand your question, you want to just "pop back and forth" between Operating Systems, rather like if you have Word and Exel open at the same time and just pop back and forth between the two. Well, what you are talking about is a computer geek's dream-true multi-tasking. And right now technology doesn't have it (yet). A CPU can only load and run one Operating System at a time. You must restart your computer so that the proper drivers can be loaded into active memory (in XP that's Task Manager) in order to run the system. In order to run two concurrent Operating Systems, you would need the equivalent of a "Dual-Boot setup in RAM", and then a single Master CPU to run each them both. Right now that technology doesn't exist.

There is a way you can use multiple operating systems at the same time, and that is by using VMWare. All you do is install your main os, and then install VMWare. Set aside some HD space so you can make a virtual drive to hold your other OS. This works pretty darn good (at least for testing things out and not having to worry about wrecking any sensitive data). The only drawback is that it is very Processor & Memory dependant (obviously, because its doing the work of two OSs at once). You can even instal several different OSs. Try out many different distros for linux, or test software on 98, 2000, xp. Netware apparently works with it too (although I haven't tried it). If your comp can handle the extra load, I'd say you should definately give it a try.

yea, VMWare is what i need. cuz my school has that where you can just log off one and go to another at will and thats what i wanted, but i didnt know how they did that. but now i do recall them having VMWare on thier systems so thats how they do it. thanks my second question i have is how changing the boot menu so i have more time to select w/out default being selected for me. or just change my default to windows. i tried editing my lilo.config but it wouldnt let me saying i dont have access to it. i dont have access to the root either so thats probably whats wrong. i dont know why though since im the only one to use this computer and i installed it. but when i installed it asked me for a user name and password, but there was an option to bypass that so i did, cuz i figured it would just always give me admin acess...but i guess not. anyone know how to fix that?

nevermind, i figured out how to log onto the superuser (admin) and i changed all that stuff. thanks for your input guys.