I have windows installed onmy big drive 120gig and i have linux installed on a smaller 6 gig partitioned with swap space

I want to boot from xp's boot loader(so i can always get into xp)
on primary ide i have dvdRW = master, hard drive with xp = slave
on secondary i have cdRW = master, hd with linux as slave

my question is, when i edit boot.ini what do i put for linux
multi(x)disk(x)rdisk(x)partition(x)

curently like this for xp: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

im not sure if linux boots "\" or "\boot" or "\linux.bin"

when i installed linux i installed at "\"
im confused

any help would be great

I'm afraid it's not that straightforward. NTLDR bootloader doesn't startup in the same way as GRUB or LILO. So you cannot just point it to a second partition and expect it to boot linux.

However, with a little work you can achieve what you want. I found an excellent tutorial here: www.linuxsolved.com which is complete and comprehensive. You essentially copy Linux's bootloader (from the bootsector) into a file on your windows partition, which NTLDR can boot.

I still say GRUB is better!
GF

well i didnt have enough smarts to make it work. so i just sucked in my gut and had faith that redhat 9 instalation would not destroy the MBR.
so i went ahead and reinstalled linux this time the boot loader would be in MBR.
still it took time to config the bios to start grub. thaught I was going to have a heart attack. but i finally have grub up and it works great. I just have one question. how do I edit grub to say "Windows Xp" not dos,

IM still confused the installation said that installing grub into the MBR would overwrite any bootloader there. but I still have windows bootloader. hey im happy. thanks

Cool, glad it's okay.
The Windows Recovery Console can fix the MBR if you've broken it. Just run "fixmbr" & "fixboot" and viola!

To configure grub, edit the /boot/grub/grub.conf file. You can change the label DOS to whatever you like, and if you move the line up in the file, then XP will be higher in the list of bootable stuff.

Enjoy!
GF