New HardDrive and MBR
 

I have a hard drive with windows 2000, that was the first OS that i installed, i use slackware with the LILO. I think but not sure that the MBR is on the Win HHD. I want to format the Win HHD and use it under linux as a second HHD. How would I go about doing that. Cuz if i format the Win HHD, then the MBR will be gone, Right? So any help would be great. Thanks.

One way to do it is to either swap the two hard drives and boot from a slack boot disk to get back into slack so you can reinstall Lilo to the MBR of your slack hdd. Since you swapped them your bios should boot from this hd first so installing Lilo to this hd's MBR would do the trick.

Or you can just change your bios to boot from your second hd (slack), but the first boot should be with a slack boot disk so you can get into slack and reinstall the lilo bootloader to this hard drive.

There is really quite a few ways to do what you want, all ranging from simple but non-conventional to more challenging and probably the more appropriate way to do it. I always read a few methods and then decide which one I'm more comfortable doing.

rberry88

I'm not ENTIRELY sure but I don't think the MBR is part of any partition. So you can do what you like with the partitions and the MBR will do what it has always done. A way to be absolutely sure you don't screw anything up is to boot slack, format the win partition into anything you want and then BEFORE YOU REBOOT, run /sbin/lilo.