WinServer 2003 Booting Problems

Booting Win2k3 And Linux

The short answer is, it didn't work. This is a total drag, since the only reasonable way to reboot into linux is to open the box and reconfigure the drives.
What a stupid bootloader!
It does not allow a boot manager choice, or to leave the MBR alone. Just takes over and screws up your booting. How it did this was not entirely obvious; I had it on the third disk. The first disk had Win98 on the first partition -- so it appears to write something to that partition so when I try to boot it naturally, it shunts to the boot loader for XP. This is okay, but then the subsequent boot failed.
Then I got increasing instability in Win98 partition. Increasing instability, in fact, in all disk activity.
I noted at the time:
"Uh oh. The ntfs partition totally fouled up Partition Magic. Manipulating the active partition with fdisk still works, but whenever I boot to the server it grabs the active flag and screws up multiboot again. There's just no cohabitation with XP -- I'm going to have to stick it on its own disk and disconnect everything else."
Which is what I had to do in the end.
Next question was: could it uninstall itself cleanly, and unscrew my win98 partition?
It never did cleanly uninstall the bootloader (a hopelessly horked thing that was installed on Win98 instead of itself. I guess it needs to live on the first partition of the first disk). I tried some manual stuff, but decided that simply reimprinting from my backup copy was fastest, so that's the approach I took. Also, the Death Of Partition Magic was annoying.
The last round of experimentation was pretty interesting. First, I took a system floppy with fdisk on it and cleaned the disk off completely. Why? Because I noticed I wasn't being asked quite as many questions on subsequent installs as on previous ones. I had been reformatting the disk, supposedly, but it was grabbing some stuff apparently before reformatting.
Weirdly, though, it could no longer read the keyboard at all with legacy USB support disabled. If I enabled it, the bios freaked out. So I reset the bios using the jumpers on the mainboard, and got a checksum error forcing a reset. I assume at this point it also screws with the bios.
That's getting scary! Who knows what manner of crap they're spewing all around my hardware? I also completely disconnected the network, just in case we're getting some weird signals sent around.
Sure enough, the final "saving settings" process goes much faster after externally reformatting. Hmm.
I'm more than a little worried about my other disks, and since that then have not allowed anything else to be hooked up while this "server" is running. Pretty wild stuff!