Hi,

I had to re-install windows XP on my computer. I did this while my crappy old windows (XP) was still up (and not running) on the other hard-disk.
Now, windows has installed its own boot-loader which asks me to boot Windows XP or the other Windows XP (which is by the way deleted since).
But... NO LILO and no possibility to get back to my good old Mandrake Linux!!

If someone knows an answer to my first questions ever on this forum I would be very grateful.

1. how can I restore Lilo again
2. how do get Lilo (re-)configured
3. how do I get rid of this rudimentary Windows-XP boot-loader

Thank you.

You need to boot your system to your Linux installation, then invoke "lilo", which will
rebuild your boot sector.

The hard part is probably the booting to your Linux installation. If you created a
bootable rescue floppy after your installation, then you can boot using it.

If you did not create a boot floppy, then you are going to need to boot using one of the
"rescue" Linux CD distributions, such as Bootable Business Card (http://www.lnx-bbc.org/)

Once you have booted, you need to mount your HDD partitions under some mount
point, arranged as if you had booted normally. Then cd to the mount point for your
/ partition and invoke "chroot". If you did everything successfully to this point, you can
invoke "lilo", which will rebuild your boot sector.

Thank you for your answer. In the end the only thing I really had to do is type rescue after booting from the Mandrake distro Cd and choose restore Lilo. And everything was back to normal (except that when I choose windows (which I intend not to do much) the 'windows boot-loader' comes up again. But I should probably post that question on 'windowsquestions.org' or something.

Problem solved anyway.

Bye

If you edit the boot.ini on your windows c drive, *linux content* from linux, as you can't edit it while windows is running, you can just take out the entry for the wrong windows installation.