Very Computer

hi,

if anyone knows of a solution I'd like to hear it.

I have (had) a dual boot (with lilo) redhat, win95 and thought I'd
finally upgrade to win98.

I stupidly forgot to make a bootdisk.

I thought I lost the original MBR, but when I scan the disk with NAV
2000 it says I have 2 MBRs.

Can I recover and edit the MBR from windows to restore the lilo
information?

If I'm screwed, I'll just do another clean install of redhat, but I'd
really like to know if there's any hope of recovery first.

any information would be great

thanks

ryan

hi,

thanks for the useful info,

I'll try booting from the cd, then loadlin.

Yeah, I think you're right about installing LILO.  I've read that
re-installing it may make
win98 unbootable.  I think I'll have to stick to a boot disk until this
apparent problem is solved.

(I just hope I can get in a make it)

thanks again,

ryan

I don't know what happened, but ...
if the only problem is to make a new install of LILO (and not guessing
any MBR's) then try to boot the Linux system. This can be done with the
'loadlin' program (should be started from your Win98 in DOS-mode).
Here's an article on 'loadlin':
    http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/bennet.html
and here's the homepage (with a download section) here:
    http://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/~lermen/HOME.html
There's another way: I don't know about Redhat, but SuSE (another
distribution) has a feature on their install CD so that you can boot an
allready installed system by booting the install-CD and selecting 'Boot
an allready installed system'.
Once the system is booted I'm sure Redhat has a tool to take care of the
lilo-configuration. Anyway: some systems keeps a file "/etc/lilo.conf"
with the running LILO-configuration. This, among "/etc/fstab",  could
give you some ideas about the previous configuration.  If you have the
"/etc/lilo.conf" file you might be able to reinstall lilo with the
'lilo' command.
There is, however, still a problem: How will Win98 react to your LILO?
Microsoft has been pretty successfull in making their OS'es incompatible
with other boot-managers. The safe way is to either install 'loadlin' or
to create a boot-disk.

Good Luck
    Aslak Johansen

[...]

Quote:> There is, however, still a problem: How will Win98 react to your LILO?
> Microsoft has been pretty successfull in making their OS'es incompatible
> with other boot-managers. The safe way is to either install 'loadlin' or
> to create a boot-disk.

[...]

As far as I know, this is no problem at all...
Win98 is bootable from lilo, and this is no microsoft issue...

regards

tom
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More trouble than LILO if you ask me, but that's a matter of opinion.

Quote:

> Yeah, I think you're right about installing LILO.  I've read that
> re-installing it may make
> win98 unbootable.  I think I'll have to stick to a boot disk until this

That's just bullshit, LILO is very wel capable of booting win98. I've
done this so many times, and never encountered any problem whatsoever.
Just boot linux, either from CD or floppy and rerun LILO. All you need
is an entry in lilo.conf that points to the partition where win98 is
installed. There's nothing more to it to get win98 booted through LILO.
Just one thing you might want to consider, put lilo in a partitition and
not in the MBR, that way reinstalling win98 won't mess-up LILO.

Eric

Quote:> apparent problem is solved.

> (I just hope I can get in a make it)

> thanks again,

> ryan

On Wed, 04 Oct 2000 15:39:13 -0700,

| if anyone knows of a solution I'd like to hear it.
|
| I have (had) a dual boot (with lilo) redhat, win95 and thought I'd
| finally upgrade to win98.
|
| I stupidly forgot to make a bootdisk.
|
| I thought I lost the original MBR, but when I scan the disk with NAV
| 2000 it says I have 2 MBRs.
|
| Can I recover and edit the MBR from windows to restore the lilo
| information?
|
| If I'm screwed, I'll just do another clean install of redhat, but I'd
| really like to know if there's any hope of recovery first.

Other people have already posted useful information, let me just point out
a thing or two:

The MBR is not part of any of the two OSs. Your Linux system is still
perfectly intact. The only problem is to get it to boot. To boot, any
Linux system needs only two things:

1) a kernel and
2) a root filesystem.

At the moment, there is no way to boot the kernel that's on your Linux
partition because you do not have a boot loader that could access it (you
trashed that with win98 -- it always happens). So you have to boot some
other kernel -- from a bootdisk or, easier, with loadlin from the DOS
prompt. That kernel needs to be told where the Linux root partition is, it
will then mount that under / and go on with the normal boot process.

So what do you do?

Copy a Linux kernel and loadlin.exe onto your W98 disk. Go into DOS mode.
Say:

loadlin linux root=/dev/hda2

(replace 'linux 'with the name of your kernel image, and 'dev/hda2' with
the name of your Linux root partition)

The system will boot up (possibly with some warnings due to a different
kernel version). Once the system is up, login as root and type

lilo

and all is like before, except now you have animated menus in Windows.

--Daniel

--
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy
 way to factor large prime numbers."   -- Bill Gates, "The Road Ahead"

Could you tell me what command I need to add to lilo.conf
So it will boot Win98.
I know it may be easy but I'm new to Linux
Thanks

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Add the following:

other=/dev/hda1   <<<<<this should point to wherever windows is
installed
    label=win98

That's it :-)

Eric

Quote:> hi,
> if anyone knows of a solution I'd like to hear it.
> I have (had) a dual boot (with lilo) redhat, win95 and thought I'd
> finally upgrade to win98.
> I stupidly forgot to make a bootdisk.

If you have the Red Hat CD, you can quite easily create a new boot floppy,
or boot off the CD...

For the bootfloppy, use rawrite.exe on the CD to create the floppy.

For booting from the CD, select "boot installed system"

Then rerun LILO.
--
______________________________________________________________________________

|Andrew Halliwell BSc(hons)| "ARSE! GERLS!! DRINK! DRINK! DRINK!!!"          |
|            in            | "THAT WOULD BE AN ECUMENICAL MATTER!...FECK!!!! |
|     Computer Science     | - Father Jack in "Father Ted"                   |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:> hi,
> thanks for the useful info,
> I'll try booting from the cd, then loadlin.
> Yeah, I think you're right about installing LILO.  I've read that
> re-installing it may make
> win98 unbootable.  I think I'll have to stick to a boot disk until this
> apparent problem is solved.

As long as LILO knows about the windows partition, it will work.
You just have to make sure your lilo.conf file is correct before running it.

--
______________________________________________________________________________

|Andrew Halliwell BSc(hons)| "ARSE! GERLS!! DRINK! DRINK! DRINK!!!"          |
|            in            | "THAT WOULD BE AN ECUMENICAL MATTER!...FECK!!!! |
|     Computer Science     | - Father Jack in "Father Ted"                   |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------