installation of dual boot RH5 and NT4WS

["Harondel J. Sibble" <help pdscc com>]

Howdy folks, having a little trouble with a dual boot between NT4WS and
RH5.0.

NT4 is already installed, the following is the info I received from a
fellow on the NT list who dual boots NT4 and RH

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On 1 Apr 98, at 18:02, Harondel J. Sibble wrote:
> Basically I have 2 drives in system, a 540mb scsi and and 850mb ide
> (both to be replaced by a 4gb scsi2 in a few weeks), NT is on the C
> (540mb scsi drive - NTFS) and the ide drive has 2 partitons, a 600mb
> NTFS and 250mb fat16 partiton.  I am gonna convert all the NTFS on the
> 540mb to fat16 using partition magic and I had planned to expand the fat
> 16 paritition on the 850mb drive to allow space for Redhat. I had also
> considered using system commander instead. Anyone have any comments or
> other suggestions?

I would leave about 50-100 MB fat16 as shared storage space for both OSes.
This also facilitates transfer of files (say you downloaded Netscape for
Linux using NT and need to transfer the file to the Linux ext2 partition).
You should reserve another 128 MB of space for the linux swap partition.
The space needed for Linux depends on what you intend to install. 

Thus the IDE drive can have 4 partitions:
hdb1 (ntfs)
hdb2 (linux native)
hdb3 (linux swap)
hdb4 (fat 16)

/dev/sda1 would be your C: (ntfs) with NT installation and NTLDR.

In such a setup you would install LILO to /dev/hdb2.
After installing Linux, keep the red hat boot floppy in the drive when it
restarts. At the diskette's boot: prompt type "linux single root=/dev/hdb2
initrd=" This gives a single user mode bash prompt. Then type "dd
if=/dev/hdb2 of=/tmp/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1" This copies the
bootsector of hdb2 (with LILO) onto a 512 KB file for use by the NTLDR.
Copy this file from /tmp to the FAT16 partition. Reboot to NT and copy
this file to C: and edit the BOOT.INI

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=C:\
[operating systems]
C:\bootsect.lnx="RedHat Linux 5.0"
C:\="Microsoft Windows 95" 
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows NT 4.0"
etc, etc
and reboot again. Linux will be on the menu.

Of course you need to make an NT ERD before you do all this since you may
end up with some repairing to do <g>
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Now.....
I left scsi drive (540mb) as all ntfs, using partition magic and linux
fdisk during installation, i setup the ide drive (850mb) as follows 

hdb1 (275mb - ntfs)
hdb2 (75mb - fat 16 - to allow info swap between both oses)
hdb3 (extended partition)
hdb5 (332mb - linux native in extended partition)
hdb6 (128mb - linux swap in extended partition)

My installation involved booting from the cd-rom and installing from
there. Now to follow along with above instructions, I reboot off cd, get
to boot prompt, type in command line "linux single root=/dev/hdb5 initrd="
and end up with an error message that "single" is not a recognized command
and get launched into the setup again. If I try the same thing by booting
from the boot floppy I get the following errors instead:

"VFS: Cannot open root device 03:45
Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 03:45"

So... is there something I am doing wrong here?  I am a complete linux
newbie, so be gentle with me please.