Either way you go, you'll need both NT's loader and LILO.
NT's is configured to stick to it's own partition. LILO can go that way,
or be written to the MBR.
If you decide to use NT's to choose between operating systems, you'll need
to write the boot sector LILO is in (probably the boot sector of your
Linux partition) out to a file. If NT is on a FAT16 partition, you can
write a scipt to do this after writing LILO. If NT is on an NTFS
partition, it becomes much more painful, involving floppys, an extra FAT
partition, or alpha-grade drivers in the Linux kernel.
If, on the other hand, you put LILO in the MBR, you can include an entry
for NT. This way seems preferable to me, because you do not need to grab
the boot sector into a file every time you upgrade your kernel, or
something else that requires LILO to be run. The entry for NT just needs
to point to the NT partition; the "other" keyword tells LILO to just load
the boot sector off the specified partition (where NT's loader resides),
without worrying about loading a Linux kernel. NT's loader takes over
from LILO there.
There is yet another way: a third-party bootloader. Yesterday I posted a
URL pointing to OS-BS, a freeware (but not free as in
speech) bootloader. It resides by itself in the MBR, and this way you can
put LILO on the Linux partition, and leave NT's loader alone. This does
mean you have to go through two menus, but that's true in both of the
above examples, too.
In my experience, the third option is the best. When you re-run LILO, you
don't need to worry about grabbing the boot sector all over again for NT's
loader. You also don't need to worry about setting up LILO to load NT. I
also find that for people unfamiliar with LILO, this is good- OS-BS
provides a handy menu which is easy to use- arrow keys select your OS, and
enter loads it. You can set a timeout, like in LILO, so if no one is
around, your preferred OS is loaded.
It's easy to set up, after you read the included readme. This file also
contains an excellent explanation of what's going on during the boot
process. But remember that any way you go, each operating system needs to
use it's own bootloader.
As for problems with NT's Disk Administrator, I use OS-BS to choose
between NT, Linux, and DOS, ad have not had any problems with NT 4.0 Disk
Administrator writing "signatures" to the disk. I've heard of problems
with NT 3.5 Disk Administrator, but I've not used it myself on a
dual-boot machine.
As for Windows 2000, I've not used that either. I'll let you know in a
couple weeks how that goes.
-Matt Stegman
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
