i had windows xp
i partitioned a drive via partition magic 8.0 (made a swap (set before c: ) and ext2 partition (set after c: ) and set mount for ext2 as / and set as primary)
i restarted after i partitioned and the intel boot loader kicked in and said it couldnt load the os. so i put in the red hat 9.0 cd and installed it (and installed lilo), but when i restarted, i was still getting the "couldn't load os" error. I found that I could in fact get into red hat 9.0, but only if i use the linux boot disk and I can't get into Windows Xp.

I'm a n00b when it comes to linux, but i think lilo isn't workign correctly. PLEASE HELP ME!

thx

try starting windows of the XP CD, and going to the repair console, and rebuild the mbr. (in the repair console type

help

there is a command in there to repairmbr or something real close. that will mean that you can't boot to linux, without a bootdisk / cd, but you should be able to reinstall lilo once you are in there.