3 Operating systems not working out !!

[guesswho]

I have Windows on a primary partition then a 2nd windows on an extended partition, but if I want to install linux it'll create another primary partition and doing so will affect my 2nd Windows and make it unable to boot, I get "missing hal.dll". The problem seems to be related to the fact that there's 2 primary partitions. (If I just create a simple second primary partition it screws up my 2nd XP). Note my 1st Xp will boot ok.

 

[PC eye]

What you need there is to avoid having Lilo or Grub installed into the mbr and use another type of universal boot loader. Once you have the third primary created using something like GParted plus the swap partition needed by the larger distros you can install the Linux loader to the root partition there. You then have the option to boot from a floppy or cd to load the distro from that or use a universal type that will load all OSs. That would be the loader that installs to the mbr.