Hi everybody!

This is my first post here and I am a very new newbie to Mandrake and linux as a whole, however, on the whole, so far I've been successful. So here is my problem: I run a Windows 2000 Compaq Deskpro with Rage 2c Graphics card (old i know, but reliable) ad just recently installed Mandrake10 with a LILO graphical bootloader but after using Mandrake when I boot into windows I get past all the "Window is starting screens" and then the screen goes blank. However, the wierd part is that the monitor must be receiving a signal as it doesn't fall into sleep mode. This can be fixed by booting from floppy into PartionMagic8.0 and assigning the Windows partiton as active but the problem comes about once again if I boot Mandrake again. As you can probably tell this is annoying me a great deal as I am not prepared to boot PartionMagic everytime I want to use Windows!

------------------HELP!!!------------------

Well, here's what I think. During installation you decided to overwrite the master boot record on your windows partition and I fear you're in trouble. Try to find some tool to fix your MBR and then go ahead and add your Linux /boot-partition to W2K's boot.ini. You'll need to copy an image of your Linux boot sector to a file by issuing the command

dd if=/dev/YOUR-BOOT-PARTITION of=imagefile bs=512 count=1

where YOUR-BOOT-PARTITION is the appropriate /dev/hd?? device and imagefile is a filename of your choice. This file goes to C:\ (in W2K, propably you can mount it rw if it's not NTFS, otherwise you'll have to copy the file to a floppy and copy it from there after rebooting M$) and your boot.ini should look like

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\imagefile-created-before="Linux"

The last line is your dd-image.

Hope this helps, if not, sorry for wasting time.

dom