I think the people on this board are perhaps the best ones to ask before I go and try this. I'm going to use some sort of boot manager to set up multiple operating systems. I was wondering if anyone had any insights, watchouts, suggestions on programs to use, etc.???

I'm currently looking at a program called Extended Operating System Loader (XOSL). It seems pretty robust, but as I've never done this before, I'm being very cautious.

My intent is to have DOS, Win98, Win2000, and Linux installed. I currently have a non-working version of Win98 "installed" , Win2000, and RedHat Linux. The only one I can't lose in this transition is the Win2000 install. My hardware consists of both SCSI & IDE hard drives and a SCSI CDR. I do have a single drive that's formatted with NTFS, but it has nothing but "extra" files (i.e. MP3's, movies, etc.... no programs installed on it). All other drives are either FAT16/32 or Linux. Everything else is pretty normal. I'm currently booting off one of the SCSI drives, but will most likely switch to IDE (see next sentence). While I've got your attention , am I going to run into any problems if I decide to upgrade to a motherboard with built-in RAID (assuming I want to boot off the RAID)?

*Any* insight would be very much appreciated.

Oh, and this all needs to be done in a matter of 4 hours? Just kidding!

Thanks!

The boot loaders usually suggested for Linux are LILO and Grub. LILO is beginning to show its age a little, but I still use it. Grub is newer, but it's ... well ... newer.

Important documents to read are the Multiboot-with-GRUB and Multiboot-with-LILO mini-HOWTOs.

You might also try looking at the Linux+Win9x+Grub-HOWTO, the Linux+NT-Loader mini-HOWTO, the Linux+Win95 mini-HOWTO, and the Linux+WinNT mini-HOWTO.

I used to use LILO to boot Linux, Solaris and W95, but when I added W2000 and NT it became more complicated. Most reliable solution was use LILO to select Linux, Solaris or Microsoft and then use NT bootloader to choose between W95, W2k or NT.

Not too much of a PITA to set up, and it works fine. Takes 2 selects to get to a Microsoft OS, but that ain't too bad.

I was planning to redo my system setup this week, so these links come in handy. Thanks

Jelle

Just wanted to thank everyone for their input. I've been reading quite a bit of those How-To's. Hopefully I'll be able to accomplish this whole thing without losing all my data.

Thanks again!