I strongly recommend putting grub in the MBR and avoiding this cumbersome technique. Details are located here.
Grub
I prefer using grub to lilo, although learning to use grub is a bit more difficult in the beginning. However, once it's configured and running properly, you can forget about. It's maintenance free. Here's my grub.conf. The timeout is set to only 2 seconds, but since I rarely change my kernel, this works out fine.
Dual-boot Mini How-to
I have both Linux and Windows XP installed on the computer. Here's how I did it.
1. Partitioned the hard drive. Here's a summary of my important partitions.
Location Size File System Purpose /dev/hda2 12 GB ntfs Windows XP (location of boot.ini) /dev/hda5 19 GB vfat Data Partition /dev/hda6 100 MB ext2 Boot Partition (location of bzImage, grub, etc.) /dev/hda7 500 MB swap Linux Swap Partition /dev/hda8 7 GB reiserfs Main Linux Partition
2. Installed Windows XP on my only NTFS partition (/dev/hda2).
3. Installed Gentoo Linux using their excellent step-by-step instructions.
4. Installed and configured grub using the Gentoo Configure a Bootloader How-to.
5. Made a copy of the Linux boot sector (/dev/hda6) and saved it to my FAT32 data partition (/dev/hda5) using the following command:
dd if=/dev/hda6 of=/mnt/data/linux.bin bs=512 count=1
6. Rebooted into Windows.
7. Moved the linux.bin file from the Windows D:\ drive (/dev/hda5) to C:\.
8. Changed the file attributes with the following DOS command:
attrib +r +s +h linux.bin
9. Made the Windows boot.ini file writable with the following DOS command:
attrib -r -s -h boot.ini
10. Edited the boot.ini file with Notepad. Mine looks like this:
[boot loader] timeout=10 default=c:\linux.bin rem default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS [operating systems] c:\linux.bin="Gentoo Linux" multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect
11. Changed the file attributes with the following DOS command:
attrib +r +s +h boot.ini
12. Rebooted and tested both boot options.
