Triple-booting with a frugal Puppy

I'm always talking about how I prefer to run Puppy Linux (and Damn Small Linux) from the live CD. But I've done both "frugal" and "full" hard-drive installs of Puppy in the past. I've also had GRUB get so screwed up that I couldn't boot anything. I'm far from a GRUB expert.

One thing I need to do -- and something we all should do -- is make copies of /boot/grub/menu.lst whenever it actually boots everything, and keep those files copied somewhere that isn't your actual working drive (where it could get erased). For instance, I couldn't get Slackware 12 to boot on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) the other day, but on the drive I'm using now (on the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client), I'm triple-booting Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and a frugal install of Puppy 2.17 (running Puppy at the moment).

So from this drive, getting the GRUB entries for Slackware and Puppy saved is a top priority, should I need to re-create this installation from scratch in the future. The problem with triple-booting is that every time you install a new OS, it wants to create a new GRUB installation and looks at all your partition for other OSes and tries to create GRUB entries that work; often they don't. I can usually Google for tips on how to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst, but I've hit a wall with Slackware 12 and the laptop.

The best advice, which I haven't acted on yet is to boot Slackware (and probably the BSDs as well) by installing the default bootloader on their own partitions and NOT on the Master Boot Record. Then use the chainloader command in the MBR version of GRUB to boot each OS with its own bootloader (LILO is the default for Slackware, although once you have it installed you can switch to GRUB if you wish; the GRUB package, along with an installer script, is on the third Slackware CD).

Taking all I've said into consideration, it's easy enought to make a relatively small partition for Puppy or DSL -- even a couple of GB or a single GB -- and do a frugal install. That way you can multi-boot without eating up large chunks of your drive. I could update this partition and go from Puppy 2.17 to 3.01, but everything is working right now, and I tend to run Puppy as is -- not adding anything -- so I'm good with 2.17 for the foreseeable future on this drive.