[PLUG] Booting Linux from CD...

[plug_0 at robinson-west.com]

In the interest of keeping Windows XP happy, I installed it 
to the first partition on the hard drive and the partition 
was rather large.  I used a Linux system on the rest of the 
drive to back up the bits.  XP is FAT32 and I use a
Windows 98 boot disk to go via loadlin into Linux.
This avoids the problem on two other XP systems I've set 
up where the primary drive is F something, but it makes 
it a real hassle to get to Linux and it exposes XP's
filesystem.

What I want to do is make a bootable freedos cd with loadlin 
and the kernel on it instead.  I have found that a copy of 
dos from, http://www.freedos.org/, works well with loadlin.
This would be a good replacement for a 98 boot disk.
With this cd, the XP partition can be updated to NTFS
as it won't need to be accessible anymore to boot Linux.

Grub installed to a bootable cdrom might work also.  

I want to stay away from any Linux bootloader on the beginning 
of the drive to avoid a, giving it away that Linux or anything 
else is installed and b, problems associated with the use of 
dd to put the bits back.  I also want to avoid some Windows 
event removing this bootloader.  The only irregularity I'm not
avoiding because I don't want to use two hard disks is
giving Windows XP less than 100% of the drive.  I'm thinking a
small 50 meg fat partition hidden by XOSL at the start of the
drive might work, but I don't want to go that route for
cases where it shouldn't be widely known that another OS 
is installed.

I wonder if the guest program for my zip drive works in FreeDos?
I might be able to sys a zip disk under Freedos and somehow burn
an image to cd of that zip disk that will boot.

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