specs:
1.00 GHz AMD Duron processor
640 mb ram
40 GB western digital IDE hd 0:0 (contains win xp only . NTFS partition)
180 GB western digital IDE hd 0:1 (contains 140 GB NTFS partition, i installed mandrake on the remaining space)

the installation from the cd rom drive went without any problems/errors. i did custom partitioning to make sure that everything would be on the second hard disk (in the right place) which i have done before in the past, i changed nothing manualy. all i did was hit autolocate and check if everything was in the proper place. after the installation i ofcourse had to reboot. doing so , when i got to where the lilo is suppose load, it prints an L onto the screen followed by 99 99 99 99 99 repeatedly till half the screen is about filled up then at the buttom it says:
"cannot find NTLDR, press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart"

i have tried to use the installation cd to go to rescue mode and re-install the bootloader lilo but that doesn't help. i had to restore the windows boot loader to boot back into windows and come here.

what am i suppose to do now. is there some partition that needs to be mounted? any help is greatly appreciated

thank you



EDIT : if you wonder why i installed 9.1 instead if 9.2 , its because i have a LG cdrom drive and i didnt want to take any risks and number 10 is due in about a month anyway

Anything like these?

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...der=descending

yeh um i checked it out. no solutions i could find though. maybe i didnt look well enough but i just didnt find any. installing the bootloader to floppy gave me the same L 99 error except this on did not stop and ask me to press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart

but just to make sure. when i am in the bootloader configuration:

i choose the option to install the lilo to MBR

this is correct right?

what does install to root partition do?

will install it to your partition mounted as / or if you have a /boot

I've found if you install Mandrake on a seperate harddrive from windows, then make the Linux drive HDA (Primary Master) and the windows drive HDB (Primary Slave). Install Mandrake and when you get to the boot loader options select HDA (the default Mandrake selection).
There is a catch to this if the Linux drive has any windows partitions on it. Windows will get confused with drive letters in most win versions. Otherwise this puts the dual booting on the linux drive only and the windows boot sector is still intact as it was before. Restoring a system back to windows only just requires making the windows drive HDA again.
The only pc here at home (of 4) that does not use this method is my server, why would I ever need windows on it lol.

thanks for the help so far guys . im a newbie so i don't think changing around partitions would would work for me. i was thinking of installing different a bootloader different than lilo to the mbr and then installing lilo to the root partition

is this a good idea?
what choices would i have of bootloaders? (i have searched the forum for this)

Grub?
osl2000?

OSL gives me the same error

what am i suppose to do? i have searched the forum and those threads you showed me were of no luck. if you know how to solve then just tell me and i'll be on my way again

you know this is so confusing to me because i created the same situation in vmware with two drives / xp installed on the primary and mandrake on the secondary and it all worked fine. the only difference is that mandrake is not the first partition on the secondary drive (for my real box). so i don't think that swapping my drives is going to help

aaagh the frustration

i can't believe no one can answer my question. is it so hard? it's like i'm talking to myself

well after looking around for an answer i found one and i have solved my problem. the problem was that my second harddisk was locking up during post/startup because of its size. this problem could be solved my installing dynamic drive overlay on the second drive using a caldera disc(floppy). the problem with that was that i would lose all data on that drive and that wasnt an option.

how i solved it:
- i shrunk ntfs partition on the first drive using partition magic because it had alot of space.

- i ran the mandrake installer. and chose to place the "/" root partition on the first drive ,on which i just free some space, so it could boot. i placed the swap partition and the /home directory/partition on the second drive.

- i installed the bootloader to the MBR as usual and finished the install

and yay it finally booted (mandrake 10 now btw)

venom_zx