Lilo lost, Install disk failing to restore Lilo on dual boot?
 

Hello Hello..happy hump day!

**Situation
-Win2k @ Drive 1
-Mandrake 9.2 @ end of drive 2.

**History (short ver)
-Win2k on drive 1 also controling drive 1's MBR
-Mandrake 9.1 with lilo on mbr of drive 2.

Installed LiLo onto Drive 1 and now dual booting without
using Bios to switch drives.
All is good.

**Trouble:
Installed HP Photosmart 7550 Printer on 2k.
2k freaked out and was forced to reinstall 2k (is true).
MBR's all freeked?????????????

Unable to boot far enough to get to CD-rom.
Boot from drive one just hung.
Boot from Drive two displayed "99 99 99 99........"
in loop.

Boot from 2k floppy disks gave blue screen and failed to do jack.
Boot from win98se 'magic boot disk' (for those who remember those :cool: )

fdisk /mbr
reboot.
2k now responds and boots clean. Goodness love 98se :cool:

**Problem
where's Lilo? Where's my mandrake gone to?
Ran rescue from Install CD's - no change
Did a reinstall of 9.1.... no change.
downloaded and installed 9.2..... no change.

Boot from drive 1 give me 2k fine.
Boot from drive 2 still gives me "99 99 99 99 99"

********just occured to me to try fdisk /mbr with drive 2 set as drive 1 (just to protect drive 1 i'll disconnect it for this bit....************

That said I have to leave here now before I can try that...
but does anyone have any ideas?

I'm spank'in new to linux...but half handy elsewise :study:

solution for lost lilo:
 

"Don't panic" :-)

Take a bootable linux cd (knoppix, first disrto-install cd, debain (net)setup cd whatever)

boot from the cd, login to the console (if you have a graphicel installer you might have to switch to a free console using ctr-alt-F1)

(I will use $: as a commandprompt indicator)
Become root (on many boot-cd you already are, on knopix do "sudo su")

$: cd /tmp
$: mkdir old-linux

try to remember on which partition you had your linux installed,
from your story I'll asume /dev/hdb1)

$: mount /dev/hdb1 /tmp/old-linux

$: chroot /tmp/old-linux

(the last command will virtually move your shell (and all paths) inside your old linux install)
from here you are free to do whetever you like (you even can do "mount proc", "/etc/init.d/networking start" and "startx", now you have your full linux install back.
But you want to fix lilo, so

$: /sbin/lilo

If lilo barks about /devices/disc0/blahBlah not found you must mount the devfs filesystem first,
usually like this
$: mount /dev
or
$: mount /devices

or implicit:
$: mount -t devfs devfs /devices
(else do "$: less /etc/fstab" here you see how and where you distro asumes devfs is mounted)

then call lilo again:
$: /sbin/lilo
$: exit

The last command will break out of your chroot-jail,
you are back in /tmp now.
umount your disk, reboot, done.


Was not that hard now was it.

Thanks pankrat..

I'm at work right now....but I will give this a run once I get home tonight or tomorrow morning (see how bad work beats me :P) and let you know how it goes.

Thanks again for the attempt if nothing else.