Physical System Info:

Triple boot system consisting of WinXp,Win98 and Redhat 9. Each operating system is installed on a separate physical disk in the aforementioned order. To boot an operating system I would normally have to change the BIOS boot settings to select the appropriate hard drive to boot from.

The problem began when I installed Bootstar bootloader to ease the selection of which operating system to boot. In its installation it installed itself to the MBR of each of the hard drives over-writing the initial program loader of each operating system. I have no problems booting XP and 98 from the Bootstar interface however Linux does not boot. Linux had been installed with the GRUB bootloader and prior to the installation of BootStar there was no problem booting Linux.

With the linux bootdisk I have managed to partially boot RedHat however a 'kernel panic' occurs with the message that an 'init' option should be specified to the kernel.

Now my question is what does this error message mean and how should I go about tring to remedy this problem. Also is it still possible to boot linux without the installation CD, and only using the linux bootdisk as well as a GRUB stage 2 boot disk. I would also like to know whether it possible to install the GRUB bootloader to the first sector of the disk instead of the MBR once linux is installed.

>>>>>
I think that the booter would have only written to the first boot device MBR. There is no point writting to the second and third MBR for any reason. If it did so, select another Booter, as the action of screwing with another MBR apart from the first one is highly suspicious.

If grub is installed in the MBR of the linux drive, you should be able to boot with the linux drive as the first boot device.

You could use grub to boot 98 or XP?

>>>>>
I would have gone about it this way:
1) Install win98 to your primary master drive.
2) Install XP to a different drive. The XP loaded should allow you to boot either OS.
3) Install redhat. The bootloader should allow you to boot any of the OSs, you should be able to even boot to the XP boot loader and then use that to boot 98 if you really wanted to.

During all this I would have all the drives plugged in and kept in the same order, no need to change any BIOS boot options either, just leave the main boot device as your IDE primary master.

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