My experiences in installing linux and a few windowses to run from lilo...

What I wanted to do one day with my old computer was to get linux running there without losing either of my Windowses, NT and 95. So in the beginning I had two hard drives, the other one (running as slave) had NT on a pretty big NTFS-partition right from the start of the disk, and the other one booted to FAT where I had an NT boot loaded and Win95. So what I did was take out the 95 with the intention of moving it to another partition and just putting linux in the first about 1.6 GB of the primary hard disk.

This choise arouse mainly from the fact that I've been doing pretty much all that matters on the NT, and I really didn't want to risk losing the data, so I thought it to be safer to just work with the other drive. Naturally, doing this for the first time the actually very simple prodedure wound up taking quite a bit part of the night... but hey, who want's to sleep anyway... So instead of telling what I did (that's a way too long story), I'll just write down what I think one should do to get that working as easily as possible:

NOTE: When I refer to other operating systems, that's pretty much anything non-unix based (or linux, don't really care about the technicalities related to naming, but you get the idea), even though I've only had experience with various windows and dos versions.

NOTE 2: Whenever adding OS's and fiddling with the booting of the system, it's nice to have boot-disks to all OS's that you want to be sure to be able to save. As long as you're running as Administrator on NT or root in linux, if you can get to the OS and the disk isn't physically damaged, you can allways easily fix the bootability problems. So MAKE BOOT DISKS BEFORE YOU START! It's a precaution that can save a lot of time.

1. Have the other operating systems installed (or if you want to install new windowses etc, do it here), and let them write the MBR:s the way they want, because at least I had quite a lot of problems trying to install Win95 without allowing it to work with (read: destroy) my MBR. If it's possible, install them to different hard drives, but have the partitions overlapping at least to the extent that the swap partitions are on other drives. IMHO this speeds up the operation.
2. Test all other OS:s and see that they boot, see the neccessary disks etc.
3. Install linux, I did it onto the beginning of my master disk (where I'd boot the system), and thus that's the only configuration I'm actually sure about.
4. Usually linux installations are pretty good at detecting other OS:es, but if some problems occur, just compare the linux hd informations to where you know you've installed the os:s and add to lilo those partitions with suitable names. Remember to write lilo... :)
5. Start running your machine... :)

So that's actually very simple a procedure. I'll just list some of the problems I encountered and how I solved them in case you run into some difficulties

Problem: A windows on the master drive won't boot up at all (blank screen or possibly BSOD)
Solution: Use a dos/windows fdisk, disk administrator etc. and make the partition the windows/dos is on active. Linux couldn't care less what dos et. al. think they can boot to, but apparently at least win95 seems to think that it's pretty important for its self-esteem to be on the active partition, so why not make it happy... :)

Problem: A windows on the slave drive won't boot up at all (blank screen or possibly BSOD)
Solution: Make sure that the partition on the other disk is active (using fdisk, disk administrator etc.). I also wrote the OS:s native MBR, but I don't really know if that's neccessary (shouldn't be...).

Problem: For some reason you destroyed the lilo on the booting hard disk and either it doesn't boot or goes to something like Win95... =:O
Solution: Use the boot disk you made and just rewrite lilo. And to linux newbies like me, lilo is rewritten to MBR by just calling lilo... :)