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triple boot


Guest greasewood
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Guest greasewood

I'm trying to put together a machine to run some older software. I bought a used pc with 40gig (eide)hard drive when WinXP 32bit (ntfs) on it. I have another HD 40gig I would like to add to it and boot Linux and Win98. I would like not to touch first drive. I would then put Win98 on 2nd drive (if possible) then Linux and use Grub or something to boot all 3. I know W98 is the problem. Or am I going to have to format 1st drive to fat and reinstall 98 and xp and let linux adjust everything?

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First of all, you will have to modify the boot loader on the first drive, otherwise it's just not going to work. Therefore grub will have to be on this drive, other than that, it would just remain Windows only.

 

Normally your order for Windows has to be as follows:

 

1. Install Windows 98

2. Install Windows XP

3. Install Linux

 

you can do some trickery with grub to switch the drive ordering to allow the second drive to become the first drive, and then boot Windows 98. Because you won't be able to boot it any other way, because I can imagine the original install is for C:, and if you put it in as the second drive, it effectively becomes D:, and then Windows will not start, because mostly of the registry settings, etc and would be too much of a pain to change all this.

 

Maybe this will help for the reordering of the drives for grub to then boot Windows 98 on the second disk, as if it was still C:.

 

https://www.google.co.uk/#q=grub+change+drive+order

 

although I've never done it, some other people have done something similar. Normally installing in the order above would be best. You can try and see how it goes with the grub reordering, but I can't help you any further with that, as I've never done it and haven't the ability to check and test it for you.

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Guest greasewood

Thanks for your reply Ian I followed you link and studying the info. I'm going to take a good look at the Grub man page too. I've been away from Linux for a while, really just a newbie period but had a lot fun learning on Mandrake just before it went to Mandriva. Now looks like Mandriva is fading away also.

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What I would do:

 

Connect the second hard drive and make sure that the first hard drive is seen by the BIOS as the boot drive.

Unplug the first hard drive.

Install Windows 98.

Reconnect the first hard drive and, just to be sure, again check that the first drive is the BIOS boot drive.

Install linux, placing the Grub bootloader on the MBR of the first hard drive.

 

If you're lucky, the linux installer will have created boot entries for both Windows XP and Windows 98. If not, you will need to create them in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

 

For Windows XP, something like:

title Windows XP
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

 

and for Windows 98, something like:

title Windows 98
rootnoverify (hd1,0) 
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

if this doesn't work try rootnoverify (hd1)

 

This assumes that you are using Grub and not Grub2. If you have selected a distro that uses Grub2 then it requires some other exotic incantation, that I'm not familiar with. Mageia uses Grub as default (with Grub2 available as an option). OpenMandriva uses Grub2.

 

Caveat - it's been a very long time since I touched Windows 98 and so this may be out-dated. :huh:

 

Jim

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