Partitioning problem. Triple boot Win98 WinXP RH9

From: Mun (muneer_ilyas_at_dsl.pipex.com)
Date: 08/30/03 

Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2003 02:16:22 +0100

Hi, my current system configuration is shown below.

- Ahtlon 1.4Ghz
- 512 DDR ram
- 76GB Hard drive
-
- C: ( dev/hda1 ) = Win98 ( 2GB )
- Extended partition = dev/hda2
- D: ( dev/hda5 ) = WinXP ( 60GB )
-
- Currently working on a dual boot setup with Win98 & WinXP.
- There is 14GB of free unformatted space at the end of the drive.

I'm trying to install Redhat Linux 9.0 onto the free space at the end of my
drive. When the installation came to the partitioning part, I asked for
automatic partitioning and it returned 2 errors (one after the other):

1. Could not allocate requested partitions:
        Partitioning failed: Could not allocate partitions.

2. The following erros have occured:
        You have not defined a root partition (/) which is required for the
installation of linux to continue.

I went into manual partitioning and tried creating a "/boot" partition just
after the WinXP partition ( D: or dev/hda5. Its around about cylinder 8150
on my HD ). It gave me a warning saying my architecture may not support
booting like this. I continued nevertheless and placed a "/" partition of
10GB after "/boot". Then I tried making a swap partition of 1GB in the rest
of the free space, but it gave me an error message and didnt make the swap
partition.

Some backround reading revealed this may be because the "/boot" partition
needs to be in the first 1024 cylinders. Is this true? Is there away to
confirm this? And if so, would it be wise to move the 2 windows partitions
forward a bit (I have Partition Magic 8), or would that cause chaos in those
OS's? Are there any workarounds to the 1024 cylinder barrier? Or is this
problem being generated by a different cause altogether? And one last
question, when the time comes, which bootloader should I use to be
compatable for this triple boot configuration?

Thank you for your time.

-Mun

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