[Whiteskin]

I just mean the installer won't automagically setup windows on the boot menu on those distros.

In order to boot into X on all distros you will need a display manager. (GDM, KDM, XDM et. al.)

[I Fix 4 U]

Listen to saikee, he knows his stuff. Yah, i deactivated windoze partition, installed grub on the partition with linux and I used it to boot Linux at first. I was just tired of making the windoze partition active every time i wanted to use it so i did a chainloader in grub so i can boot both without changing the active partitions. Any problems and BLAM! I make the windoze partition active again and It'll just boot windoze.

P.S. Why would you worry about windows being in the bootloader by default, you can always modify the grub.conf any time you like.
O and yes, lets say grub is your default and starting bootloader, and you have some other distro on your second harddrive in partition 6 you'd say chainloader +1 also with (hd1,5) (always can be changed to suit your needs) and viola, lilo will be loaded by grub which will then load that distro. Great when bootin Solaris.

[saikee]

The best trick is to assign the swap partition as the first logical partition as it hasn't got a bootloader.

Putting the Linux bootlaoder into the extended partition is physically putting it in hda4. This way every Linux distro is fully preserved and protected withit ints own partition, including its original boot menu and bootloader. Hda4 is a neutral ground.

Using the extended partition for booting one can kiss all the Windows booting good bye. Also if one is really crafty he would let the last Linux bootloader to occupy the extended partition, by that time it should have included every bootable system in the drive for you.

The extended partition can be made active simply by a DOS's command Fdisk in a floppy. The bugger won't do it for a DOS extended partition but has no second thought for a non-DOS (Linux) extended partition.

In Linux cfdisk you can't even see, create or mess the extended partition which is fully visible by fdisk -l.

Grub is superior to Lilo in many ways but I haven't found out if it can make a partition active for me yet. In Lilo the command is "lilo -A /dev/hda 4". The 4 is separate from hda saying let all partitions in inactive except the 4th partition.

[I Fix 4 U]

Good job again saikee.
You are thinking about installing windows and than many (or few) linux distros all on the same harddrive. Yup best idea is to have windows installed first, have an extended partition, put your first distro on it, then your second, while ignoring the bootloader and not installing one. Then on your final linux distro you want installed, choose grub and it should make entrees for every OS you have on your system.

Then with some windows boot floppy, run fdisk and make the extended partition active instead of windows. That will make windows unbootable but wait i'm not done yet. Remember saikee, to make the windows partition active just add "makeactive" to your grub.conf under windows part.
For correctly tweaking grub ask me I had alotta fun making grub do things it normally doesnt.

[saikee]

I am not thinking about it I have already 9 Linux systems with XP.

I think you get the idea. I just repeat a few items.

(1) Best way is to use the first logical partition for the swap because it has no bootloader. The extended partition physically is the first logical partition. Since a swap partition's first track is never used it is the ideal place for the boot manager once the extended partition has been made active.

(2) Apart from not letting a Linux to format the whole hard drive you can let its bootloader go anywhere without a consequence but keep it inside it partition has one advantage - You get its boot menu after chainloading and can use it to jump to another Linux. In fact you can jump around in circles between Linux without getting into anyone and try to satisfy that each one boot Windows successfully.

(3) When you make Windows inactive it is still available from every Linux's boot menu. You don't have to do anything to make it active.

(4) You can instruct any of the Linux bootloader into the Extended partition by just one line of command, using either Lilo or in Grub as the case may be.

[I Fix 4 U]

whatever i guess that will also work but atleast my way works too so i dont have to change anything ...