Ok if you just want to get windows running you can use a win98 boot disk and type fdisk /mbr to clear the master boot record. But its really weird that it cant find lilo or lilo.conf if it installed it. Probably best just to reinstall deb and this time install lilo to the master boot record of your primary harddrive

I know how to get the win98 boot disks in floppy format well enough, the thing is, do you know of anything I can do cdrom wise.. I have another floppy in the room, but I pretty much leave it unplugged from the system and would like to have a cdrom way of doing it in the future.. would the winxp disk do it perhaps?

Of course, i have to search for that a bit.. it's here somewhere *looks about*

Found something called the ultimate boot disk and there are some tools on the site with it that should do the fdisking job that I need.. hopefully.

one moment.... I'm writing a simple lilo.conf for you

be right back,
-= iluvatar =-

Oh thanks.. I'll wait for that..

AFAIK none of the windows cdroms have fdisk on it. I think theres a way to do it with lilo or something but have forgotten how.

You could also write a kernel to a floppy and use that to boot your linux system

ok, back to basics. the rescue cd must be used to boot the system. when booted, you must access your hard disk install. this is done by the chroot command. now you work on your local installed linux system, the cd isn't used anymore. if now the /etc/lilo.conf cannot be found, just put this in lilo.conf:

#begin /etc/lilo.conf
boot=/dev/hda
prompt
timeout=600
vga=normal

image=/boot/vmlinuz #your kernel name here, check your /boot directory on hard disk
label=Linux
read-only
root=/dev/hda3

other=/dev/hda1
label=Windows
#end lilo.conf

now try putting this in /etc/lilo.conf and run /sbin/lilo (in the chroot enviroment).

hope this works now, if /sbin/lilo gives an error just post it back here

greetinz,
-= iluvatar =-

Yeah I've done that before, but my recent hatred of floppies and lack of them makes me not do that. I guess I'll have to get over that though as I doubt there is a cdrom way to handle it instead of requiring a bootloader of some kind.

will get to that now.. thanks

yay! back to windows, and didn't need to do the above, I just redid it again and
this time followed the order.. this installation procedure was a bit odd.. and I didn't want to do it in order because of the repartitioning the hd but I finally got it to go through.. I installed it's normal MBR utility instead of Lilo on the MBR, and then configured that by default to load windows, and it works.. now I can only hope I can run linux on there as well, but so far it still just won't recognize my swap file (another problem I've been having)..

anyway better off than I was

thanks

hmm.. this mbr utility, if I hold shift it brings up numbers, and I"m supposed to press 3 to go to linux.. but it's just not working.. it delays for a sec but eventually goes to windows instead.. I think it just won't work.. for whatever reason.

Debian.. it is a real pain I have to say, and one of the other odd things is it installs the 2.2 instead of 2.4 kernel by default (well, seems odd to me at least).

Anyway.. I'll try to figure that out, along with why this doesn't include a decent partition manager that doesn't require nuking everything. Mandrake by far was the easiest to install so far, and had a nice visible manager for dealing with partitions and such.. this is just a pain.. I'd heard it was good for something or other but I'm beginning to think it's a waste of time.. either of you have other distributions that you think I should check out instead? Mandrake was userfriendly but it had huge problems with dependencies and such.. and I kinda wanted to get to using something that was somewhere inbetween this (debian) and that..

Thanks again

I once had the same problem for some reason my swap space stuffed up and everytime i played urban terror itd run out of ram and crash. I just reformatted the swap and it worked again.
mkswap /dev/<swap partition>

I think it was because I had it set as logical partition in partition magic perhaps.. it shows up oddly in there as if there are really 2 partitions.. going to try it again later with it set up this way and it will probably detect it now.

Dont think it being a logical partition would make much difference. The reason its shown as 2 partitions is that a logical partition has to sit within a physical partition and partition magic shows the physical partition that the logical partition resides within.

If you looking for a nice distro try out slackware, as long as you dont want a GUI config tool for everything.