I cant fdisk /mbr whaen i do it says unable to open /MBR how do i do it anyone hel;p

Can you tell us where you are running that and what you are trying to do?

Slackware 10.1 Ever since i installed a few weeks ago lilo doesnt work no matter what i doedit the confg fgile reinstall so i figure somethings up with my mbr cuse i have virus protect off on the mobo and i get lilio error L10 so i want to fdisk my mbr by useing fdisk /MBR but it says unable to open witch it shouldnt

What do you want to achive by that? Are you running that in linux?

If you want to reinstall lilo then run liloconfig and it will help you install lilo onto the mbr.

I already said i tried to reinstall lilo it does not work so i want to fdisk mbr and i want to redo the whole machine but i can not do the mbr

Seems like i need to have a windows boot disk but i dont have a floppy to do it my floppy drive wire was cut by my little bro so yeah

Ok, so you are trying get the computer to boot a windows bootloader?

Which version of windows are you using?

No you arnt reading what im saying ok here

Im Running Slackware 10.1 I want to format my HDD and also Redo my MBR

Ive goggled mbr and it seems like i can only do fdisk /mbr with a windows boot disk but i dont have a floppy

so i want to know if i can do fdisk /mbr with out a floppy on slackware and if so than ima formate my hdd and fdisk the mbr and hdd and reinstall slackware

I'm not sure are telling us what we need to know or reading what I'm saying.

Redo? What do you want to put on the MBR? You can use mkfs to format the partitions. If you are going to reinstall another operating system then it should put the correct data on the mbr for you.

If you want to install the windows bootloader then yes you can only do it with a windows disk. If you have 2000, xp or 2003 then you don't use fdisk you use fixmbr.

You don't need to fdisk /mbr to install slackware. Just reinstall slackware if you like then choose to install lilo onto the mbr.

My MBR is messed up its fooked lol just want to redo it by doing fix mbr or fdisk /mbr but i dont have a floppy to do it so i want toi know is there another way to do it with out a floppy

Can you just forget about fdisk and the mbr for a minute.

Can you confirm that you want slackware linux to be the only OS on this computer?

here ok here ill explain it the best way i can ok

Im on a labtop there is no floppy drive so i cant use it to do fdisk /mbr is there a way to do it with a cd rom

If you want to erase the mbr and the partition table of the disk
boot from a linux cdrom and do (assuming your drive is /dev/hda)
Now if you want to keep the partition table, I am not sure but I think
you use the same command exept you replace 512 with 446

I have a headache.

you're right there:

filling in " 446 " will erase all but the partition table.
filling in " 440 " will also leave the disk-id untouched.

the id might be used by windows to recognise the disk, and if it's erased,
( you'll guess it ) it won't start from that disk.
i think it's optional but it might be default.

egag