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Old 10-20-2004, 09:07 PM   #1
mikeCanada
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Dual Boot Option Problem


Had a problem booting back to winXP I had a dual boot between Mandrake 10 official and today something went wrong...Wouldn't boot anywhere and after I got into windows recovery, I had to remove the dual boot option..Windows is fine, but how do I get the dual boot back? Do I have to re-install Mandrake?? Thanks
 
Old 10-20-2004, 10:31 PM   #2
jschiwal
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Basicly you need to boot up with a boot disk to get back into Linux and re-run the /sbin/lilo to re-install the boot loader. Assuming you haven't changed any of the partitions it should work. If you don't have a boot disk, you could boot up with the first install disk and enter the option 'rescue'. This will get you into the rescue mode, in which the root directory structure is in ram.

There will be a menu option to mount your system under /mnt. Select that and then 'cd /mnt' and then 'chroot /mnt' so that the root directory is back like it should be. Next I would execute 'bash -l' to read in your actual startup script, which will set up your normal root paths and aliases. This will allow you to run vim for instance and not just 'vim-minimal'.

Now cd to /etc and make sure the /etc/lilo.conf is in good order. If it is execute '/sbin/lilo'. Watch what is printed as it works, because if there is a problem accessing one of the partitions, or an error in lilo.conf, then the MBR will not be updated.

The reboot and keep your fingers crossed.

If you get back into Linux later, there is something you might want to do. With the 2.6 kernel, or som 2.4 kernels, the kernel is too big to fit on a floppy. But you can produce a rescue cd (about 4 MBs in size) by executing as root the command 'mkrescue --iso'. This will produce a .ISO file that you can burn to disk and use the next time you can't boot up normally.

Some distro's have a mkboot --iso command option which would be nice to have, but Mandrake's mkboot script doesn't have that option presently.

Last edited by jschiwal; 10-21-2004 at 02:24 AM.
 
Old 10-20-2004, 11:21 PM   #3
mikeCanada
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Thanks for the great reply...I'll give it a try and let you how things went...thanks again..
 
Old 10-21-2004, 01:26 PM   #4
mikeCanada
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I booted with disc 1 and got to the rescue screen. There was an option there to re-install boot loader, so I chose that one and voila..done in 5 seconds...re-boot and all is well...Thanks for leading be in the right direction...
 
  


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