I have tried to install a number of Linux distros on my PC, including Red Hat 7.2, Fedora Core 1, and most recently Mandrake 10. Every time, the bootloader, be it GRUB or LILO, has filled up the screen with repetitive garbage. With LILO, it fills the screen with "L 07 07 07 07" etc., but never gives me the boot menu. GRUB did something similar. I am trying to set it up to dual boot with a Windows partition on hda and the Linux partitions running off hdd. (I would simplify things and just get rid of Bill, but this computer isn't for me.) Because of crappy case design, I had to set up the drive order strangely, and I haven't been able to experiment much with that. Each time this has happened, I use fdisk on a win98 disk and use thefdisk /mbr command it it's fine, so long as I never want to boot into Linux, but that kinda defeats the whole purpose of installing it, ya know?

Thanks for the help, and please, no RTFM answers, okay? I've searched everything I know to search for, and I'm kind of at my wit's end.

Filling your screen with junk is the result of something on your HDD changing, and you not updating your MBR.

Things that can change and break your MBR :

Changes to partition table
* Deleting Partitions
* Resizing Partitions
* Creating New Partitions

Changes to the Kernel :
Removing, Renaming or Moving a Kernel (that's in the Lilo or Grub menu)

If you have a Knoppix / Bootable Buisness Card Disc, I can walk you through putting lilo back in your MBR. If you want grub, you'll need to ask someone else - I haven't used it on a big scale.

Sure, reinstalling lilo would be good. But I had just installed Mandrake and rebooted when it did this. Shouldn't the installer have rewritten the mbr appropriately?

No, that's definately not supposed to happen. I am starting to wonder if there is something funky with your MBR?

So you think it's just a good old fashioned disk error? I'll run a scan and see. But it boots into Windows just fine with the generic fdisk bootloader. It *seems* like that wouldn't be it.