I have managed to cripple my Windows XP in the video driver departament so when I boot up now I just get a blank screen. I can go into 'rescue' (DOS) but without the driver/video wizards I am lost!

Windows on hda1 and Slackware on hda2 (root) and hda3 (swap). If I reinstall windows is it going to reformat my whole hardrive or will it just reformat hda1 and possibly overwrite lilo which is on the MBR?

If I loose lilo do I just need boot floppy?

I need XP for games I am afraid and this has been a pain so far. I will be gutted if I have to reinstall slack because it has taken ages to get everything set up properly and installed.

Cheers.

I have just recovered an older windoze machine from the same problem...it was w98, and all I had to do was to boot it so that I got to say y/n to every driver/thing it loads on windoze boot....I left everything concerning the screen off, and got it somehow started so that I just and just was able to open control center & remove all screens...after a reboot it asked me to install a "new screen" and that was it luckily. but if you can't get it done without a reinstall, then...

you will loose your lilo, if it's in mbr and install a windows. so prepare a boot floppy for your slack, so that lilo can be reinstalled later...then I think you should be able to install windows so that it only formats hda1 where it is installed.

try it... I think you should be fine, as long as you jusr remember to make a bootable floppy for slack. with slack you can then install lilo easily...

Thanks for the advice.

Problem or two!

Don't seem to be able to make a boot floppy with makebootdisk because I have an external floppy on /dev/sda only. makebootdisk looks for one on /dev/fd????. I did

ln -s /dev/sda /dev/fd0

But this doesn't help one iota.

Can I make a boot floppy manually??

um, not sure if i'm in right "thread".....
i have dual boot with xp-pro. currently i have to boot linux with floppy.
is there a way i can use grub or lilo or even powerquests "boot" thingy so i dont have to floppy my way in to linux?, I also dont wanna bott xp with a floppy. i thought if i used grub or lilo, it would work with wi9x but not xp/nt because of boot.ini

i found this, i'm gonna try it out, i'll let you know.
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

this i think is even better:
http://www.prosig.com/protor/kbase/NT-Linux-boot.html