Linux boot partition help

[Lend273]

I have Libranet Debian installed on my 2nd hard drive ( HDB1 ). I have a swap partition and a / partition.
I have another partition that is designated as a Linux extended partition ( HDB4 ).
I want to install Slackware on this partition but when I go into Partition Magic it won't let me designate it as a boot partition. Will I be able to do this during the Slack install?
Partition magic tells me I need to "hide"
HDB1 if I want to make HDB4 bootable.
Is this true? How do I get around this?
I want to eventually end up with a tri-boot
system. Windows 98 on my first HD, then Libranet and Slackware on my 2nd HD.
Thanks for the help.
Len

[Pyrosophy]

The /boot or / mount point has to be mounted on within the first 1024 clusters of the hard disk in order to boot correctly. I'd try repartitioning and mounting so that the / partition is the first thing on the first partition (hdb1) on the second drive. Sometimes if this doesn't work then mounting /boot there works.

If both fail, it is possible to non destructively resize and repartition the *first* drive so that 5mb or so are free that you can mount /boot on. Then you can install lilo or grub on that first partition. But putting the boot partition and mount first on the second hard drive *should* be enough for Bootmagic to recognize.

Let me know if you tried all this and I can come up with something else...

Pyro

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You can never be strong. You can only be free...

-Guided By Voices

[ovf]

You should be able to boot it using Loadlin.
In case your not familiar with the utility it runs under DOS and is invoked with a command such as "loadlin bzimage root=/dev/hdb4". In this example it will first boot the compressed linux kernel bzimage. I will then mount /dev/hdb4 for the OS to use. There's a lot of documentation on loadlin available on the web. As a side benifit it allows you to setup some pnp hardware in DOS prior to booting linux. For example I use it to configure SBLIVE! in DOS prior to booting linux.