Oh dear! My wording was not quite correct. When I said:

I don't know of a way, without grub or lilo, to do what you want.

I meant

I don't know of a way, without a boot manager, to do what you want.

In mitigation of my error, I would point out that dbar mentioned Grub and Lilo, so I repeated what the user was comfortable with.

In my time trying to determine a foolproof method, for newbies and worriers like me, to dual boot Knoppix and Windows I investigated a number of boot managers. Grub, Lilo, Smart Boot Manager, Loadlin amongst them. I finally settled on Grub as my preferred option, especially the customised versions from the Grub4Dos project. As I said, I am a worrier. From all I read, I deemed Grub to be the most versatile, still actively supported and the least likely to screw up my system. Something that dare not happen to a newbie who wants to try and move away from Windows by trying Linux, but not lose their capability to run Windows.

I had not heard of XOSL so I did some Googling. XOSL is just another boot manager. I found the following two statements about XOSL in the documentation I found.

Currently XOSL can only be installed to FAT16 or FAT32 partitions (provided that your version of DOS supports it).

No good for NTFS users then

The MBR (first sector of a hard disk) contains an IPL (Initial Program Loader, or whatever you want to call it) and a partition table. When XOSL is installed, it replaces the existing IPL, with one to load XOSL.

Messing about with an MBR, along with introducing new partitions, is, in my opinion, too much of a risk to screwing up the Windows system.

Consequently XOSL is no good to me on two counts already. It may be a perfectly good option for those who are happy to bit twiddle with their hard drives - but too much of a risk for me.

The grub files from the Grub4Dos project do not need new partitions, do not mess with the MBR and are really easy to install - just copy a file to the right place.

I realise that were I to do a full hard disk installation of Debian Linux, or some such, then I would have to do something different - but that is not what is asked for in this thread.

ICPUG