On Thursday 26 May 2005 23:04, Dr. Sharukh K. R. Pavri. wrote:

On Thu, 26 May 2005, R M wrote:

...

add boot settings for new distro in the already installed boot loader's config file.

Can't be done, the OP says he has to have XP on this machine. So that will hog the mbr. What I suggest is install the bootloader on the first part of the respective root partitions.

Use grub as the boot loader. U dont need to reinstall grub unless u install windows xyz AFTER installing grub. You just need to edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst. In the case of lilo u have to reinstall lilo everytime u edit the /etc/lilo.conf. Also grub allows editing of every parameter at boot time. It can also read file systems, provides a shell (grub shell) and has online help. So it's very handy if you are juggling distros, kernels and drives. BIG FAT WARNING: write down what ever u are doing to prevent disaster. Some distros do not create the menu.lst. So get one and copy it to /boot/grub. Grub numbers disks and partitions starting with 0. So hda5 - the first logical partition on the primary ide - is (hd0,4) eg root (hd0,4) Ideally install windoz first. Then the other distros. Also create a mount point for the partition which holds /boot/grub in all the installs, so that u can edit menu.lst easily. In any case u can boot any distro from the grub shell like so

root (hdx,y) kernel (hdx,y)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.11-abcd root=/dev/hda10 ide=ata100 dma etc etc append="whatever"

note root=/dev/hda10 is the regular linux naming convention.. if u have an initrd

initrd (hdx,y)/initrd/initrd-2.6.11-abcd boot

rgds jtd