can i install LILO without having any linux cd? i lend them to my brother. i unfortunately had to install winshit xp and, of course, it took the monoply on my startup and linux wont boot anymore.
can i download it and install it from windows?

thanks

You best bet may be to download a live distro and boot with that.

Another option is to locate a boot.iso image, that could be found on a ftp site for a distro, but I don't know if such an image would have a 'rescue' option. This is the image that might be contained on the first installation disk, such as MandrakeLinux

You can download knoppix or peanut linux using this site's mirror links if you wish.

Running lilo is best done when the system is mounted correctly, because the offset to the kernel and initrd on the drive device is saved to the boot loader, and the partitions referenced in the /etc/lilo.conf file are checked before the mbr is overwritten.

ok it worked, thanks!!
finally back on linux

but i have (again) a question. when i first installed mandrake, i had two partition on my hard drive and he detected them automatically. now i formatted it (because one was in ntfs) and i have two new fat32 partitions. the problem is that there are only my old partitions mounted, and i cant do anything. how can i mount my new partitions? i have three of them.

thanks again

The Mandrake graphical program 'diskdrake' does a good job at mounting partitions. When you finish, it asks if you want to save changes to /etc/fstab, which you want to do. Also, for filesystems such as NTFS or Fat32, it will include options like the encoding that you may forget about.

One changeto consider, if the partition is a non-home partition that you want to use for storage, then you may want to use the 'uid' and 'gid' options for fat32 (vfat) partitions.