With P3 hardware and 98SE in the mix, I wonder just what kind of a monster capacity drive you're attempting to run?

120 GB; which should be in the limits of SE without any additional patches/hacks.

Edit:
Intel P3 733
512 MB RAM
120 GB HDD
Voodoo 3

CU-133A+ wrote:

I had a very stable 98/Lubuntu dual boot working but have run into difficulties incorporating XP. Originally, I partitioned the […]
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I had a very stable 98/Lubuntu dual boot working but have run into difficulties incorporating XP. Originally, I partitioned the HDD into three primary and one extended partitions.
1: 98SE [FAT32] (Pri)
2: XP [NTFS – Left empty] (Pri)
3:Lubuntu [ext3] (Pri)
4:Linux-Swap [linux-swap] (Ext)

If I'm not mistaken, you can't just use your extended partition as-is – you have to create a logical partition inside your extended partition. Actually, you might as well just leave it as a primary partition since you've only got four partitions total. That might have something to do with why you're having boot troubles.

98SE definitely has to be on a primary partition; I'm not sure if you can get away with putting XP on a logical partition. Exactly one of the primary partitions should have an "active" flag.

Last time I mucked with this I simply could not get anywhere using GParted-created partitions directly, but I was using FAT32 for XP so the circumstances were kind of weird.

Are you using GRUB for a bootloader?

Also check the boot.ini file in the root of the XP partition and make sure it's pointed at the right partition.
If it's not, you'll get that "ntldr is missing" because it's looking for ntldr in the wrong place.

BootIt NG might be helpful.
Take a look on a video that i posted on my youtube channel about multibooting any kind of o.s with boot it ng
https://youtu.be/Qz1gQORp7PU
Contact me over PM if you need some "additional info" about the boot it version that i used on video.

I once had a Problem with win2000 which can't find its own Bootloader after the first restart during setup.

I had to change Disk access mode from OTHER to DOS or vice versa.

Ok, so I managed to get it to work in the end. However, as Jorpho, I couldn't use GParted no matter what partition scheme I used.

Method
1. Clear all partitions and make sure drive is unallocated using GParted Live.
2. Boot with Win 98 floppy.
3. FDisk a PRIMARY partition to the desired size.
4. Format partition.
5. Install Win 98 SE.
6. Boot from Win XP Pro CD.
7. Assign desired size partition for XP & format using XP installer.
8. Install Win XP Pro.
9. Boot to live Linux CD and install.

Boot Order
GRUB -> Linux / XP
XP (NTLDR) -> Win98SE / XP Pro

Jorpho, you are correct the Ext partition had a logical partition within it. I have edited the OP to reflect this. No, I wasn't using GRUB but trying to dual boot using the XP NTLDR.

.legaCy thanks for the link, however I managed to work around it. Sammy, also thanks for the tip but I didn't need to use it.

Points of interest
I don't know why GParted cannot create the appropriate partition scheme. I also don't know if other partition software would produce the same result. When XP created and formatted its own partition it did to a logical/ext partition. I followed suit with the Linux install. This suggests that XP HAS to be on an ext/logical partition for a dual boot.

CU-133A+ wrote:

This suggests that XP HAS to be on an ext/logical partition for a dual boot.

Not at all. The system I talked about in the thread I linked to has XP and 98 in primary partitions.

One thing that is for certain is that XP will happily boot from drive D, whereas Windows 98SE will insist on booting from drive C. Thus, if Windows 98 is in your first primary partition and the partition is marked as Active, then when you try to boot from your second partition, XP will expect to find its files on drive D – which of course will never work if the XP partition was initially marked as Active and XP thought it was being installed to drive C. The way to get around this is to use "makeactive" in GRUB when booting from the XP partition. (I'm not sure what the equivalent is with NTLDR; I haven't messed with that much.)

I was going to ask you to post your grub.conf, but as long as it's working now, there's no point in worrying about it.

When you do partition manually with Gparted, have you set the boot flag? And for the right partition?

CU-133A+ wrote:

Ok, so I managed to get it to work in the end. However, as Jorpho, I couldn't use GParted no matter what partition scheme I used.

I can confirm, that this is unfortunately still the case, even with latest GParted.

I did managed Windows 98/XP dualboot at the and, but as with Jorpho and CU-133A+, I was forced to use just Fdisk for creating small FAT32 partition for Windows 98 and then create rest of partitions during Windows XP installation.

So, at the end I have 3 partitions in my PC, C (5GB, 98, FAT32), D (55GB, storage for both OS, FAT32) and F (20GB, XP, NTFS) and I'm all good.

The only other annoyance was of course, that Windows XP wasn't able to format 55GB partition to FAT32, so I had to use FAT32 Fromat GUI.