I am trying to dual boot Slack 10 and XP Pro on my laptop.
I have installed LILO at the beginning of the Linux root partition (/dev/hda2 ), not at the MBR. A suggestion I have come across in order to dual boot is to copy the boot sector of /dev/hda2 (using dd) in a file e.g. c:\slack.bin and then add the line
c:\slack.bin="Slackware" in the boot.ini XP file. (The root partition begins below cylinder 1024). However this does not help in booting Linux (the annoyning "hal.dll file missing or corrupt" error message at boot). Is the boot sector guarranteed to be located at the very first 512 bytes of the root partition? Should I create a separate boot partition?

Does anyone have other suggestions? Is installing LILO at MBR a safe solution?

Thanks