I once saw a guy who somehow chainloaded the winxp loader to load grub, then to load linux. He had to do an awful lot of stuff to do it, though, and I don't remember any of it. But I think it's possible.

I'm giving up on this for awhile, I've tried a few different things including physically switching the master/slave drives and using the Gentoo Grub bootloader to boot to both OSes. Need to take a little while to let my frustration level settle.

I guess I'll work on backing up stuff on the Windows drive so that I can afford to screw things up badly. I should probably just replace the old LILO bootloader on the windows drive with Grub or something and be done with it...if it works. Thanks for replies.

Another bit of advice (I don't know if you have done this or not). Make sure that your windows drive is master and your windows partition is the first on the drive. And, also, boot from the master drive. Install grub on the master drive and it should work. You could also try asking in the Gentoo forums (forums.gentoo.org), they've helped me with all my problems.

You can use the NT loader to fire up gentoo. All you need to do is do a dd to get the master boot record from the gentoo drive and place it into a file on your boot partition and add an entry under your boot.ini. If your boot.ini lies on an ntfs partition, you can use captive-ntfs to mount it read-write. Even still, you can format a floppy and copy the boot sector to it to get your boot sector to your windows partition. Google for captive-ntfs. The Linux Documentation Project has an article on booting linux from nt loader somewhere. I believe, IIRC it goes something like this.

 From Linux# dd if=/dev/hdb of=/mnt/floppy/linuxboot.img bs=512 count=1From WindowsC:\> copy a:\linuxboot.img c:

Then edit your boot.ini accordingly

[boot loader]timeout=30default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS[operating systems]multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP"... C:\linuxboot.img="Linux"

My Windows partition actually isn't the first one, some strange DOS/DELL partition is, and I wouldn't be surprised if that causes me problems. I was going to wait until a new system I ordered got here and then just blow away the primary bootloader since I could risk it at that point...

But I think I'll try (again) booting using the NT bootloader, I tried doing something like that before but I think I was missing a step.