Peaceful coexistence of Linux, DOS, Win95 on TP701?

["John H. Kim" <jokim@tuna.mit.edu>]

(This is a long rant followed by a question to Linux users who've
gotten it to coexist with Win95.  Ignore it if you don't use Linux
or are a fan of Microsoft.)

Somebody shoot me, I tried to install Windows 95 on my Thinkpad.

I'm trying to make web pages on my TP701.  Linux on the TP701
doesn't support more than 256 colors so Netscape's graphics look
really bad.  A substantial portion of my existing web pages have
unix (long) filenames so I can't just copy them to a DOS partition
to edit under Windows 3.1.  The only OS which I can run Netscape
on in 32k colors with long filenames is Windows 95.  Since I only
have 8MB, I wanted to keep DOS/Win3.1 around for more frequent use.
So I tried to install Win95 on my D: drive, a logical drive.

First of all it blew away LILO.  At least that's what I thought.
I reinstalled LILO several times and Win95 still insisted on
monopolizing my computer.  I've had an easier time getting rid
of viruses.  I finally loosened its stranglehold by reinstalling
DOS on the C: drive, then reinstalling LILO.  That worked, but
now I couldn't start Win95 (funny how in the manual and install,
Microsoft assumes you'll only be using one OS - their latest).

Silly me for assuming an "advanced" OS like Win95 can boot from
a logical partition.  Apparently it needs its config.sys on the C:
drive.  So I repartitioned under Linux, giving Win95 an alternate
primary partition, and made a logical FAT drive for data (I've
done this several times with OS/2's fdisk with no ill effects).
I used a DOS boot disk to format these new partitions since I
read somewhere that it's best to format DOS partitions with DOS.
The next time I tried to boot Linux, I found that its (logical)
partition had been modified to make Linux think it was umsdos, and
all the data is apparently gone.

I fiddled with Linux's fdisk for a while, but I don't know much
about partition tables so I wasn't able to switch it back or figure
out what happened.  To make things worse, I found out the computer
I'd backed up my data to cleans out its /tmp directory every Sunday
evening (I never thought it'd take more than a few hours when I
started all this on Friday).

So here I am, my TP701's 720 MB hard drive completely empty.  No
DOS, no Win3.1, no Win95, and no Linux on it.  A large amount of
my data has evaporated (fortunately, I made a second backup of
the important stuff).  And I have a short presentation in 10 hours
but no computer to write it on.  All because I thought I wanted
to install Win95.

Needless to say, I'm not a happy camper.  Before I descend back into
this insanity, has anybody here gotten Linux, Win3.1, and Win95 to
coexist on a single hard drive?  I think the fact that it's an EIDE
drive may have something to do with my problems, so if you've managed
to do all this on an EIDE drive, I'd be really interested in hearing
how you did it.

A pox on Gates.
--
John H. Kim         "A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight
jokim@mit.edu       for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in
jokim@tuna.mit.edu  a national election."  -- Bill Vaughan