Installation success, boot load fails
 

I have completed a successful instal of Mandrake 9.2 on my PC as a second OS along with XP home. XP is loaded on the master HD on the primary IDE and Mandrake is loaded on the first partition of the slave HD on the primary IDE (root is in hdb5 in my case).

I installed GRUB as my bootloader and loaded it into hdb5 as part of the install. Apparently, the install also loaded LILO into my MBR and when I rebooted, I got a screen full of 07 07 07 ... I used the rescue mode on the install disc to reload my windows boot loader. At that point, windows booted fine but no way to get to linux.

The next thing I tried was booting back into the rescue mode and going to the console window. There, I did the following:

dd if=/dev/hdb5 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt

cp bootsect.lnx /mnt

My floppy now had the bootsect.lnx file (512 bytes) on it and I was able to reboot into windows and copy the file to my c:\ directory. I then modified my boot.ini file with the line

c:\bootsect.lnx="Mandrake 9.2 Linux"

I saved that, rebooted the machine and the windows boot loader gives me the option of XP or Mandrake. The problem is, when I choose Mandrake, the screen goes blank (with the exception of a blinking cursor in the upper left corner) and nothing happens after that.

Any ideas as to what may be wrong and how I go about fixing it?

Thanks in advance!

nimonm

I would say that lilo didn't install to both the MBR and hdb5. BTW did you also create a boot floppy during the install? Look at /etc/lilo.conf.

You need to boot the 1st CD to rescue mode.
Mount the / partition.
chroot /mnt/<mount point of root>
Edit lilo.conf to write to hdb5
lilo (to write boot loader to hdb5)
Do the dd copy file thing.

Create a boot floppy (using another floppy disk)
mkbootdisk <kernel image name>

I finally got it figured out. The problem was in my BIOS. The setting for my second device on the primary IDE (the drive where my linux install resides) was "none". I changed it to "auto" and now have access to linux.

Thanks for the help.