I've tried to install red hat 7.3 (on my computer that has Windows 2000 on it. please don 't ask why.It was an emergency and i didn 't have any other distribution).

I have chosen lilo as bootloader but i think i didn 't chose to write it to mbr. When I start up my computer, it just starts in windows 2000 without giving me a choise.

How can i fix this? I need a detailed description because i know just a few things about linux..Thanx for any help..

Write to the MBR.

If you want to remove it later, you can do a /sbin/lilo -u in linux or fdisk /mbr from a dos bootdisk.

do i have to reinstall red hat to do that?

Just do an upgrade- which is an install, yes- and it'll rewrite the MBR without having to reinstall everything. It'll find your previous install.

i reinstalled red hat choosing grub as bootloader and writing to mbr but nothing changed.Still my windows 2000 begins as if there is no linux installation.
Any other suggestion?

Perhaps you can get GRUB to take by performing the install from within RH 7.3. The documentation in the GRUB Manual gives a few different methods. The simplest would be using grub-install /dev/hda at the command line. You might have to change /dev/hda to meet your drive configuration. By the way, what is your hard drive configuration? This may explain the situation a little better.

Bill

i have 2 harddisk.one is primary slave and the other is secondary slave.

my windows 2000 is intalled on primary partition of primary slave one.

I try to install linux on secondary slave.there were 3 fat32 partitions on it.
i divided one of my fat 32 drive into 3 linux dirves.(2 ext3 drives and a swap)

Does this help?

also when i boot my linux by boot floppy with "linux rescue" i can 't see any file named grub.conf anywhere!
am i doing something wrong?

I suppose it would be too much to ask if you could use a distro and boot loader from this decade..

Redhat 7.3 came out before Windows 2000. Way before. Even RedHat 9 is old and no longer supported. Is there any particular reason that you are trying to make your life difficult?

I know it's not a server, because you are dual booting. I know you have net access, because you are posting here. So, I'm wondering why aren't you using Fedora Core 3, or RedHat ES, or Whiteboxlinux or the like. Why?

posof, your last post explains a lot. What has most likely happened is that you installed GRUB to the MBR on your second hard drive. When your computer comes up it looks at the MBR on the master drive and never sees the MBR on the slave. One way around this is to switch which drive it boots from in CMOS. This is okay, but my preference would be to install GRUB on the master hard drive.

When you boot from disk and use rescue mode the system you are looking at is actually on a ramdisk. The rescue disk attemps to locate any Linux installs on your hard drives and asks which one is the root partition so it can mount it. If I remember correctly the mount point is something like /mnt/sysimage. At that point you can chroot /mnt/sysimage /bin/bash and look around just as if you started it normally (might be a few kernel differences).

Another question, did you make a boot disk? If so, you should be able to use that to get to your RHL 7.3 install. A boot disk is much easier than the rescue disk.

With all that said, what do you have to do to install GRUB on your first hard drive? I don't know what type of drives these are, but if they are IDE then they will be recognized as /dev/hda and /dev/hdb under Linux. hda being your master and hdb being your slave. Get into linux either by using the boot disk or rescue mode on the install disk. You should then be able to issue the command grub-install /dev/hda to install grub on the master MBR. After that boot up and tell us what happens.

Bill

i have installed red hat in same disk where my windows is installed.
now linux starts without problem but my windows has gone.

i installed lilo and chose to write it to mbr. during installation it found my windows.And lilo has a choice to start windows. But when i chose it just prompts

"
Loading
L?
"
and freezes.

Do you have any idea about what that means?

Something may be out of sorts in your configuration. Post you /etc/lilo.conf. Probably a good idea to see what your partition table looks like too. You can use fdisk to display that. What happened to GRUB?

Bill