Okay, I really need help - I had windows XP installed on C:\ (first partition - hda1) and have installed Mandrake 10 on hda9.

Right, I am using LILO as my bootloader (but get a problem with Grub too) and cannot boot into windows.

What happens:

-LILO: Locks completely after windows has been selected and pressed.
-GRUB: (Now this could be the problem) tells me that the filesystem is unrecognisable

The filesys of C is, of course, NTFS

Here is my lilo.conf

I remind you that I'm pretty much a lin n00b (not a win noob ).

Please help, as I really need my Windows!!!!


Edit: I think the MBR is completely screwed up, I re-installed windows (2000), formatting my C: (first) partition. This didnt work, I don't think it even touched the MBR

So I went into the 2k Recovery console and ran fixboot and then rebooted. Still no help, it locks as soon as it tries to boot win :'(

So I don't know what to do - has XP locked the MBR as it is???????

Please help!

If u had win xp then installed linux & then reinstalled win 2K chances are you completely f*k yer MBR
With mandarake you should use recovery when booting from install cd's
and to go back to windows u will need some sort of bootable floppy + format command, boot into prompt and do format c: /mbr (not sure if this is exact command but try format /? or -?
anyways i dont think that lilo will work with double boot with Xp... I only suceeded with Grub from Drake 9 and XP, 2 weeks later i was running Red Hat
no draky draky

If you look at the above quote from your /etc/lilo.conf you seem to be telling lilo that you've got 2 versions of windows in the same place.

Hence it appears that it's looking for 2 OS's in the same place on /dev/hda1

So, unless you do have 2 different versions of windows installed (which I feel is a little pointless), you should edit your lilo.conf and take out which ever you want. If you prefer, you can always remove the 2nd "other" bit that's labelled winxp and then just change the label of the first one.

don't forget, if you do edit, you'll need to run /sbin/lilo as root to make the changes official

regards

John

edit- p.s. If you do have 2 versions of windows installed you should just change it so it can see which is which i.e. /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 - which should have the same result as what I said above -/edit

Don't worry about hte double entry - that was just a test you see, and I have worked out that it is the MBR that is completely messed up.

I tried re-instaling with 2k but it seems it wont touch the MBR whatever.

I have tried fixmbr <installing win2x> fixboot.

Now when I boot it tells me that it cannot load Operating System.

Nice.

I have re-installed Lin loader (with recovery) and am posting here. It looks like the MBR has become locked somehow :S


Edit:I REALLY REALLY need a nice 2K boot floppy. If anyone has such a thing can they PLEASE copy the files into a zip or tarball and upload somewhere. This is because I cannot get into windows at all and therefore cannot make a boot floppy!

I really hope this dont slip............

i have the same problem...
you can do fdisk /mbr. according to what i read this should not erase the partition table, so your linux and windows should be safe. i'm stressing should because this is from what i read. the only times i've done fdisk /mbr were when i didn't care about saving my partitions. and beyond that restore your windows with fixboot and linux with a rescue cd and hope that this works.
if anybody has any more information about this or whether this would work please share, thanks

ps. also check out this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...disk+microsoft

UPDATE:
ok, i got my windows working
i used program called MBRWiz that i read about in one of this board's threads. it didn't fix the problem entirely, but at least rewrote mbr. then i had to repair windows and now it works.
i'm left without Mandrake tho, because it hangs on installation, ehh...

I just know that lilo can only boot within 1023 cylinder boundary, so within 8G boundary. Make sure your hda9 is located within that boundary.
To be precise the /boot where the linux boot should be in that boundary.

Now for the problem windows xp can not boot up now because mbr is
screwed.
I happened to get exactly the same situation, although with different reason.
I have windows XP on /dev/hde1, and 10.0 on /dev/sda3.
Everything went smoothly when I instaled 10.0.
I can boot to windows xp and linux no problem and I have it for several
days until last night.
I can see the windows partition from linux.
So last night I try to access some of my pictures in windows partition
from linux. And this is when the problem comes. The next time I want to
boot to windows and it would not let me in.
I try to bring partition magic, and it will not able to recognize the /dev/hde
anymore. Not only that the windows xp install CD can not recognize that as well, and the install CD always crashed and can not let me in to its recovery mode.

Now this is what I do. It might help you. No guarantee.
The only thing I can do is to go back to linux 10.0. The linux tell me that my windows is now reside in /dev/hde4, instead of /dev/hde1 as usual.
To fix this problem , I run drakx to shrunk the windows partition, so that
I will be able to create a dummy linux extended partition /dev/hde1 and /dev/hde5.
Then I run linux fdisk, and reorder the partition name. It did it, and put
my windows partition back to /dev/hde1 and nicely change the extended
partition to /dev/hde4 and /dev/hde5.
This might sound crazy but it is true. The next time I did is the windows XP install CD now can let me in into its recovery mod. From there I run the chkdsk to make sure everything is recover and OK. Then I run the fixmbr command to make sure the windows loader is back.
Now I can get back to windows xp. I lose nothing on my windows.
Everything is still perfect. And I can still get back to linux too.

Now to mandrake 10.0 admin:
Why accessing files in windows from linux can move windows partition to /dev/hde4 ?
The ntfs file system is mounted ro to linux. So teoretically nothing can be
written into it right ?
I think 10.0 is still a crap software.

change harddrive access to LBA in bios

My harddrive access is already in LBA.
Both seagate in /dev/hde and maxtor in /dev/sda, all of them using LBA
access.

oh sorry
i just installed mandrake 10
flawless install
xp still boots
absolutely NO problems at all

must be a hardware thing

apologies

Try "Fdisk /mbr" and not format /mbr