Installing Windows 98 after Linux

Recently I purchased an old 1.2GB hard drive in order to install Windows 98 onto my previously Linux only box. I faced several hurdles and since a number of web searches didn't produce much of value I thought I would note down my (ultimately sucessful) experience here.

Creating a Boot Floppy
The first hurdle that I had to overcome was creating a DOS boot floppy from a linux only machine. I'd long ago formatted over the windows install floppy which had come with my Windows 98 CD. This turned out to be harder than I thought, however ultimately I discovered that "WinImage" disk image files can be copied onto a floppy using dd. Simply download a DOS image from the web e.g. www.bootdisk.com, unzip it, and then "dd if=<dos-image-file > of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024; sync" That should create the disk for you. Make sure you grab a floppy with CD-ROM support! (I didn't originally)
Installing Windows
The hard drive I wanted to install windows on was going to be an IDE slave drive, but when I booted into DOS and ran "SETUP.EXE" on the Windows 98 CD-ROM, it complained that it couldn't find anywhere on my primary (linux) hard drive to work. After a number of different trials, I did the obvious thing and unplugged the power on my linux drive and shifted the former slave drive to master status.
With this switch, Windows happily installed itself. Once the install was finished and everything was configured correctly (this was not nearly as easy as it sounds here) I reinstalled the power to my linux drive, restored the windows install to slave status and booted into linux.
Setting up LILO
I use the LILO boot loader to boot into linux. I simply added:
other=/dev/hdb1
label=win98
to my /etc/lilo.conf Make sure you also have the prompt keyword in the configure file to allow you to choose an OS at boot time. Then I ran LILO and rebooted. I selected "win98" at the boot and (amazingly) Windows booted fine.

Final impressions. It had been a long time since I'd used windows and I had always thought "I'm not sure that linux can really compete on the desktop." But after this, I've done numerous Linux installs on some exotic machinery (old Macintoshes and DECs) and none of them were as much of a pain in the ass as installing Windows. That combined with the fact that Gnome's UI is 400x better than Windows gives me hope! (Its still not as pretty as Apple's Aqua, but thats a whole 'nother story)

Anyway thats all for now. I hope people find this helpful (and that Google finds it...) If you have any questions mail me