Triple Boot: How to keep it simple?

[TLM]

Hi,
I am getting ready to put VL, Win XP, and Win 7 (BETA) on one hard drive. I am installing the two Windows onto separate partitions. I am considering 2 options for boot managing.

First, I could just let LILO try to detect and configure everything. I will be installing XP, then Win 7, and lastly Vector Linux. Has anyone done this sucessfully without a lot of manual LILO tweaking?

My second option would be to leave the Windows boot manager intact, and boot Vector with a floppy or the install CD. I would prefer using a floppy if I go this route.

Any suggestions? Maybe other options I have overlooked? Thanks for any and all input!

[MikeCindi]

I've done something similar with Vista, Win7 beta, mint6-64rc1, and VL6rc4. The mint grub loader detected all the OSs and on rerunning liloconf in VL it detected all the OSs so you could probably get lilo to work with no extra tweaking. A difference may be that I have two HD's on my laptop but the BIOS only allows booting from the primary SATA slot. Also there is a utility that will allow you to use the Windows bootloader for other OSs. There is one for XP and a different one for Vista but not sure about Windows 7. (Since you are loading W7 after XP then the W7 bootloader will "take over".)

[GrannyGeek]

My second option would be to leave the Windows boot manager intact, and boot Vector with a floppy or the install CD. I would prefer using a floppy if I go this route.

So I guess you have a floppy drive. They're getting rare these days.

Booting from a floppy works fine. Only one of my computers has a floppy drive. It's the one I use for beta testing upcoming VLs until they get far enough along that I can trust the VL being tested for my other computers. When I install a new beta or RC version I always put LILO on a floppy and boot with that when I want to run the version I'm testing. It also shows me whether it'll detect other operating systems without finagling.
--GrannyGeek