The Linux Linux+DOS+Win95 mini-HOWTO by Alan L. Wendt, alan@ez0.ezlink.com v1.0, 10 September 1996 How To Boot Linux, DOS, and Windows 95 from one Hard Drive using Lilo. The problem: W95 and DOS get confused if more than one partition is marked active, so it's necessary for the boot manager to activate their partition before booting them, and to unmark any others. W95 and DOS also for some reason relabel partitions on the booted device so that the OS always appears to be located on drive C. So for example, even if you install DOS into partition E on your main drive, it will appear as partition C when it's booted. 1. Use Linux fdisk or Partition Magic to create three partitions on your drive. Install W95 on one partition, DOS on one with (for example) format /s c:, and Linux on the third. If you have only one (DOS) partition on your drive to start with, Partition Magic is the easy way to break it up into three. FIPS does the same thing for free, but it's a little trickier to run. 2. Get a copy of lilo.17.tar.gz, which as of August 1996 was the only revision with the ability to update the active flag at boot time. There's a copy at ftp://ftp.ezlink.com/pub/lilo.17.tar.gz. Compile and install it with REWRITE_TABLE defined in the Makefile. Install something like the following in /etc/lilo.conf and run /sbin/lilo to update the MBR record on your drive: boot = /dev/sda compact delay = 5 # optional, for systems that boot very quickly vga = normal # force sane state ramdisk = 0 # paranoia setting root = current # use "current" root image = /vmlinuz.1.3.97 append = "aha1542=0x230 ro" label = linux other = /dev/sda1 table = /dev/sda rewrite-table label = dos other = /dev/sda2 table = /dev/sda rewrite-table label = w95