Installing Windows2003 on a multi-boot machine

[bgl]

Hi,

I have a set of machines that have dual-boot (Linux+Windows) in a testbed. Until now, Windows2000 was mainly used but it seems that we need to do more testing on Windows2003. So I've deployed Windows2003. Currently we have a setup of windows2000 that is installed in unattended. I have the same for Windows2003.

But I encounter the following problem: the mbr of the machine is overwritten by Windows2003 so I have to perform a manual intervention to rewrite it to get my multi-boot menu back after the installation.

I don't want to manage the multi-boot menu from Windows since I have a centralized deployement infrastructure.

So my questions are:

* can I block the mbr overwrite from Windows2003 during installation ?

* can I overwrite the mbr from windows2003 ? (I've tried but without success...)

* May be those 2 previous points are not going in the correct direction...so do you have idea on how to do this ?

One last point: I want to use only free softwares...

Thank you very much for your help/advices.

[cluberti]

You'd have better luck using Linux's GRUB to overwrite or repair the boot sector after Windows 2003 is installed. There's no way to keep Win2K3 from overwriting the MBR (and it will never detect your Linux install properly, no matter what distro or boot loader), but using your Linux boot floppy you should be able to get back in and "fix" it via GRUB (it can be done with LILO too, but most newer distro's use GRUB at this point).