I faced a small problem / strange Windows behaviour while putting up a Win98SE, WinNT4, RH7.1 triple boot. It is regarding the filesystem type of the extended partition. I'll describe the whole procedure to you. By and large I followed the instructions from the multiboot document at "http://math.uwb.edu.pl/~mariusz/multiboot/" . Single Hard Disk : Windows98, NT, Solaris, Linux.

I had a 40GB HDD (IDE). I wanted to keep a layout as follows :

2GB (primary) WinNT
5GB (primay) Win98
512MB (primary) Linux /boot
Extended ----
512MB (logical) Linux swap
6GB (logical) Linux /
2GB (logical) FAT (for transferring files from one OS to another)
6GB (logical) FAT32
6GB (logical) FAT32
rest (logical) FAT32

I began with a clean disk. Made boot floppies of Windows98, NT 4.0 Server.
Booted with Win98 boot disk. Did fdisk /mbr. Created a FAT partition of 2GB. Rebooted. formatted the partition. Installed a bootmanager .. osloader2000 (www.osloader.com) which allows one to hide partitions. hid the partition created.
Rebooted with Win98 boot disk. created a FAT32 partition of 5GB. Rebooted. formatted the partition. Now installed win98 onto this 2nd partition, while the 1st partition was hidden. This is because, win98 seems to want to sit on the first available partition (otherwise, it warns that it found another partition and wants to remove those files during setup).
Rebooted. hid the win98 partition (2nd one) this time. and unhid the 1st partition. Installed winNT on this partition. Shutdown.
Booted machine with RHL 7.1 CD1 and created /boot (primary) partition using Linux fdisk. Created an extended partition on the remaining space. within it created logical volumes for Linux SWAP, Linux /, FAT, FAT32. Installed Linux.

Here comes the problem part ..

Now, when I start up, all 3 OS work fine. but windows seems to have confusion recognizing the logical volumes properly. Windows Explorer reports the same FAT32 partition twice as 2 different drives!!!

So, i go back to the old thumbrule : use the fdisk utility of the OS that is to read the drives. So, I went to Linux fdisk and deleted the FAT and FAT32 logical volumes. Changed the extended partition type from 5 to f (win95 FAT LBA).

Booted with win98 bootdisk and created the logical partitions using windows fdisk. Now, when I try to boot with Linux, it gives an error. but if I use Linux fdisk again to change the extended partition type from f to 5, Linux works fine. How do I get around this problem? Having to change the partition type before having to boot into an OS is pathetically cumbersome.

Looking forward to ur advice.

Are you hiding each OS from each other when you boot up?

Windows don't always recongize Linux installations as a usuable area. Maybe you should hide the Linux installation from Windows and see if that cures your problem.

Maybe you should install nt on its own computer.