i'm on another box. my main box has been hacked, i think. i am pretty computer savvy and have never had a problem i couldnt recover from until now. i have vurtually no access to my computer. i was multibooting mandrake 9.2 and xp and when i reboot all i get is a screen full of 99's. ninety nines everywhere. when i boot from a disk none of my hdd's are recognized. they are detected but when i try to access them from doss they are not there. when i run fdisk it recognizes all of the partitions and says i have logicals but when i try to view them it says they are not there.

i ran regscan and it says ther's a problem not fixable. i tried to reinstall xp and it says it can't find a swap file. i tried to reinstall mandrake and it stalls upon partitioning with error.

i don't want to format. besides, i can't format because the hdd's are not found.

can someone please help

Have you tried doing a low level format on both the HD's? After doing that, then try re-installing. Those utilities also come with hd diagnostic tools. To find them, go to your HD's manufacturer's website. They helped me out quite a bit.

-twantrd

thanks for the response. these forums are great. i was advised to try to repair the mbr, which i had no idea how to do but turns out that typing in dos; fdisk /mbr took care of the problem, which apparently was in lilo.

To re-install lilo from the mandrake disc's, you put the first disc in, boot the system, at the prompt, hit f1 and then when the text prompt ask's, type rescue, then just follow the instructions to re-install the windows bootloader or re-install lilo to the mbr etc

You can get a similar problem with a screen full of grub's when that malfunctions.

regards

John

thanks john