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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

Today I spent maybe 5 hours transferring my 500 MB of DOS programs to the 
new computer, which is supposed to have Win98, DOS and BL2 each in its own 
partition (fat32, fat16 and ext2).

We used PQMagic (partition magic) to make the partitions.

Since you can have only four primary partitions on one drive (this one is
20G so I don't need multiple drives) I transferred four partitions worth
of DOS files to one partition and then spent a lot of time changing c: to
d: in assorted batch files, and combining rarely used directories so as to 
get dir/w output onto one page, and deleting duplicate files.....

I then followed the installation instructions for BL2.
Since we already had a linux partition I assumed I could skip mke2fs - 
perhaps the instructions should explain this.
First thing I did wrong was to forget to put in the SW71 installation CD 
before mounting /dev/hdb to /cd.
I tried to mount and install to /dev/hda3.  On the first linux computer 
(without Win98) hda1 is DOS, hda2 is Linux.  On the second computer with 
three OS's hda1 is Win/DOS, hda2 is linux.

I was told hda3 this was not a valid linux partition so I ran mke2fs, 
as instructed, and it became a valid linux partition to which I 
could install BL2, which I did.

I then discovered that when I rebooted in DOS I could not access D:, which
was no longer my DOS partition because the DOS partition was hda3 (as I
found out by using fdisk) and the partition which I had made for use with
BL2 was hda2.

The order of partitions as shown by fdisk (after I put the second one, 
hda3, back to FAT16 with no data) is hda1, hda3, hda2, hda4 (another linux 
partition which I might use for SuSE for purposes of setting up monitors).
This is Win98 DOS (DOS 7).  Why did the partitions end up in this order?

I redid the partitions with PQMAGIC - first I deleted all but FAT32, then 
made DOS, and two linux partitions in that order.  It still reads hda1, 
hda3, hda2, hda4.

Anyway, I think the instructions for installing to hard drive should 
mention that before installing, if you have formatted with some other 
program, to run fdisk anyway to make sure of the proper drive to use for 
linux (and do NOT do mke2fs if you have already formatted a linux drive).

I am about to spend a few hours transferring 500MB of DOS files again to 
this computer.  Future linux computers will not have Windows on them.  
Hopefully I can use Abiword instead of Windows to read WORD files.
It was quicker to install Win98 and Wordview than to download Abiword.