[ros-general] Installing ReactOS with other OSes

[Rakhesh Sasidharan]

Hi all!

Am thinking of trying out ReactOS on my home machine, but thought I'd
clarify a few things before going ahead. 

My current setup is this: I have a primary master disk, on which I have
Windows 98 (primary partition), FreeBSD (primary partition), Windows XP
and Linux (logical partitions). I use GRUB as my bootloader. I have a
secondary master disk, on which I plan to install FreeDOS (primary
partition), and ReactOS (primary partition). I checked up with the
FreeDOS folks and it seems installing FreeDOS into my existing setup is
a no problem -- FreeDOS would need its equivalent of config.sys and
autoexec.bat to be present on my C: (which is the Windows 98 partition),
and other than that there should be no hassles (FreeDOS will install its
bootsector on its partition only, and I can get GRUB to load it from
there).

>From the installation pages of ReactOS, I figure that if I were to
install ReactOS into my current setup, it would add itself to the
Windows XP boot manager. Coz my Windows 98 partition is currently
active, and that's where the XP boot manager is installed, and that's
where the ntldr and boot.ini files are located. Righto? 

But suppose I don't want to boot ReactOS through the XP boot manager,
can I do the following: make the ReactOS partition as active beforehand,
and so when ReactOS installs itself it will find that the active
partition has no boot manager or files etc and so will install the
bootsectors to this partition ... and then I can use GRUB to load these
bootsectors to boot into ReactOS? Is this possible? ReactOS wont
overwrite my MBR (GRUB) or XP boot manager etc in this case right? 

Thanks,
Rakhesh