Hi again
I've figured this out, wih thanks to baldyeti. Here's the system:

Gateway Solo5150 (PII-300)
128meg ram
4Gig drive
Dead onboard sound, so USB SoundBlaster
DVD/CDR drive which won't read Knoppix disks after 3.1, so Sonic USB DVD+-RW (unfortunately not bootable with this BIOS)
Cardbus 56k modem (Cirrus chipset)
Cardbus D-Link 10/100 ethernet
Targus USB optical micromouse
Radio Shack roll-up flexible 104-key keyboard (bad "p" key onboard)
Blitz NetWave Point USB 802.11B
Generic 4-port SB expander

This system hangs at boot unless I leave all the USB devices unplugged until after the BIOS has been read. I wait until an os begins to load and then plug in the port expander; otherwise I must unplug the ps and remove the battery to kill the hang.

The BIOS doesn't give an indication as to whether LBA32 addressing is used, but assuming that has not trashed the drive--yet. (LILO makes that assumption but installs with a warning...)

Anyway, here's what I've been after, and here's what I got.

The Win98 FAT32 install is flaky, in that I can't scandisk or defrag. So no chance to fips and shrink the drive, leaving enough for even a Poor Human's Install of Knoppix on a new partition. (I could try to boot win in recovery mode and then scandisk and defrag, but that has never worked right for me before, and has every time mucked my configuration, so forget it.)

Instead , I've needed a means to dual-boot linux and win from the same drive, with the current Knoppix in a directory on c:\.

From the external DVD drive I copied the entire contents of the Knoppix 3.4 build 5-10-2004 into C:\knoppix and then copied linux24, linux26, minirt24.gz, and minirt26.gz into there from C:\knoppix\boot\isolinux.

This allowed me to boot from floppies with the fromhd=hda1/knoppix cheatcode; I also added gmt and myconfig=scan codes after cleaning up my config and saving the changes to the drive. I also added a 256meg swapfile on c:\, but had to boot knoppix3.1 and use a root console from there to do so. (Got permission errors from inside root console in 3.4.)

Note that 3.1 boots just fine from the Matshita internal cd but 3.2 and up won't, and that 3.4 detects all my hardware flawlessly.

Next I configured lilo.conf as follows:


backup=/dev/null
vga=791

prompt
delay=100
timeout=100
default=win98

other=/dev/hda1
label=win98

image=/mnt/hda1/knoppix/linux24
initrd=/mnt/hda1/knoppix/minirt24.gz
label=knoppix-2.4
read-write
append="gmt lang=us noprompt myconfig=scan"

image=/mnt/hda1/knoppix/linux26
initrd=/mnt/hda1/knoppix/minirt26.gz
label=knoppix-2.6
read-write
append="gmt lang=us noprompt myconfig=scan"


This file is saved at c:\.

I had map, singlekey and alias lines in there too, but removed them to clear some lilo warnings and to clean up the resulting lilo menu; from inside a root console in 3.4

lilo -b /dev/hda -C /mnt/hda1/lilo.conf -m /mnt/hda1/mapfile -v

installed lilo to the mbr of the only drive hda (previously known as C:\ haha) and created a new mapfile at c:\. As noted a LBA32 warning was ignored.

The bad news is that before I had this all working, lilo would boot directly into whatever os I called default, and after booting a win98 recovery disk and fdisk /mbr resetting the mbr, my aol-6 isp was dead (corrupt main.idx)

This took about 10 un- and re-installs of either AOL9 or AOL6 before either would work, and to decide that 9 was such a memory hog that it was unworkable on this system. So AOL6 had to go back on, and about 20 logins and reboots later (to get all the little update files) I could test this latest lilo.conf.

I don't think this was any fault of lilo, but rather a fact of the corrupt FAT32 filesystem/BIOS address space; seems the freespace on the drive had to be completely overwritten for it to reply properly.

Whatever, lilo installed properly and subsequent boots now allow for default into win98, or selecting knoppix with either a 2.4 or a 2.6 kernel.
Woohoo!

I still have to unplug the port expander every time (too much current draw there) but I FINALLY have a system which selectively boots different os's with a base win install (which cannot be altered except for adding a directory or so) and adds linux by copying a disk. I've built a lot of pcs and have promised this to a lot of folks, and I'm a happy dwarf, mutant, hairless non-pink snarkfinder now!

Now to figure out how to change the color of the lilo boot screen, and to get wine to run aol. Then I can change the default to boot 2.6 and never use win again; any suggestions?

Thanks to baldyeti for the advice on the filesystem and minirt2x.gz and lilo.conf and everything

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