Ok first thing you will need to do is have a windows 98 boot disk, partition magic on a floppy disk.
Put the boot disk into the floppy drive and start up the computer, choose to boot the computer without cdrom support.
Next load up partition magic. Make sure that the drive is total free space and that no partitions are made. Next you will Create a Primary partition of roughly 4-5 gigs (fat32) depending on if you want to have a share drive for all of the os's. then you will need to Create an extended partition for the rest of the drive. Then you create 2 more 4-5 gig logical partitions (ntfs) for your other 2 windows os's. Then create a 20 gig fat32 logical partition for sharing between the 4 os's. Hit apply and wait for a while. When done, put the boot disk back in the floppy drive and restart.
This time choose to boot with the cd drive enabled. Put in the windows 98SE disk. Install win 98 on the c:\.
Reboot into windows 98 after everything is installed. Put in the windows 2k pro disk. Make sure that in the advanced menu, you select the option to choose which drive to install windows 2k to otherwise it will install to the c drive. Install win 2k to the d: or e:. Whichever one is fine as long as it is one of the ntfs drives. It may ask you to convert to the win 2k ntfs, go ahead and do that as long as its not your c drive. When you are done installing 2k do the same exact thing for xp except install to the other ntfs drive. (2k and xp will install a boot loader automatically ).
Now for the harder part, mandrake.
Put the mandrake cd into the drive. Reboot
it will come up with a prompt that says boot>
hit <Enter> and go through some trivial stuff.
When it pops up for partition stuff run whichever program you want to and make a 100-500 meg partition (in the still available free space) for the virtual memory /(something cant remember what its called). Use the remaining space for an ext2 partition and mount as '/' If you know enough you can mount the windows partitions using this program but I prefer to do it by hand to have more control. Continue installing mandrake as you like (its pretty easy to install mandrake). Just make sure to install the kernal source code. Upon finishing installing linux, (if you installed the kernal source) goto '/usr/src/linux'stuff (should be whatever number your kernal is). Once in that directory, type 'make menuconfig'. If all goes well it will put you into a semi-grraphical menu thing. Search around choosing 'Y' for things you want or need (dont konw your setup so cant help you too much) but once you get into the file system support section choose the following
Dos Fat
vfat
ntfs readonly support (do NOT choose read write support, very bad)
once done with the menu exit and save the configuration
type 'make dep && make modules && make modules_install && make bzImage'
after all the compiling move the bzImage file from '/usr/src/linux(stuff)/arch/i386/boot' directory to / or /boot and then edit the lilo.conf file (using pico, vim, or emacs) (i think its in /var but type 'updatedb' and when that is done type 'locate lilo.conf' and it will tell you where it is) Add the new bzImage file to the configurations near the bottem where it will say image=vmlinuz or something like that, create a new one with the name NewLinux and make the default one whichever you prefer.
make sure that you use the example at the end of the lilo.conf file for getting the windows partition to load (will be /dev/hda1 though instead of 4). (email for help on this one if you cant figure it out). After rebooting into linux edit the fstab (again a 'locate fstab' to find it)
now add the following lines in:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/c vfat defaults, rw 0 0
/dev/hda3 /mnt/d ntfs defaults, ro 0 0 (may be hda2 but i doubt it)
/dev/hda4 /mnt/e ntfs defaults, ro 0 0 (may be hda3)
/dev/hda5 /mnt/share vfat defaults, rw 0 0
make sure that you have the /mnt/* directoryies to exist
then type mount /mnt/driveofchoice if you have any problems post here.
that should be all that you need
