Last night I installed Redhat 8 on my main system at home. I configured LILO to write to the MBR on hda1, which has Windows 2000 installed on it. The linux installation went onto hdd1.

I made sure to add Win2k as a recognized OS on hda1 when installing.

Linux runs just fine, but Windows does not. When I boot, the system goes through POST, loads the Intel Boot Loader thing, then displays a signle "L" at the bottom of the screen and locks up. I assume the L is LILO attempting to load, as this never came up before. The lockup is not hard, but it stays right there and the hard drive light stays on constantly.

To get into the system at all, I have to use a boot diskette to load redhat.

I kept the same BIOS settings I had for Win2k, but I don't think that the problem is in the BIOS. I'm afraid that I corrupted my MBR but wanted to see if anyone can give some feedback.

Thanks!

Flatline

Howdy,
i am a little confused by "Linux runs just fine" and "I have to use a boot diskette to load redhat"?

Can you now only boot into redhat and to do this you need a boot floppy?

Is linux on a different hard drive on another ide bus ( this would seem the case from your message) ?
Is your root partition on /dev/hdd1 ?

Pls give us a bit more to go on.
Thanks
Ian

I hope you meant MBR on hda, not hda1. The MBR is located by referring to hda. The boot sector of the first partition is referred to as hda1.

If you haven't guessed I'm a newbie at this...let's see if I can get all of it in one go:

-Yes, I can only boot into redhat and I need a floppy to do so.
-hda1 is master on the primary IDE bus; hdd1 is on the secondary bus.
-MBR is on hda, not hda1.
-root partition is on /dev/hdd1.

thanks again

hey there i had the same prob, try this site it helped me HEAPS in getting win2k and mandrake 8.2/9.0 and my mates comp too,
dual booting win2k and linux
it even tells ya how to fix u're MBR
i hope this helps u out

Peaches
Jack of all trades - Master of none!!