I installed Mandrake to a seperate hard disk (hdc) and it installed LILO on the mbr (hda, Windows XP). However I've replaced Mandrake with Slackware 9.1 and put LILO on the Linux disk (hdc) to dual boot instead of on the mbr. But I still have LILO on the mbr that links to the now gone Mandrake Linux. How can I reinstall the windows bootloader on the mbr without reinstalling windows? I tried to reinstall it using 'rescue' from the Mandrake CD but it didn't work.

Thats easy make a XP bootdisk and boot off it when in DOS type the following:

fdisk /mbr
and reboot.
This will write XP's MBR back to the disk killing the LILO one.

Once you put a bootloader on the MBR you can't get rid of it so I have the solution. Uninstall LILO from hdc and overwrite the LILO configuration for the MBR it should be in /etc/lilo.conf, change it to boot the Slackware partition

Ummm with the fdisk /mbr option you can... I know cause I have done this more times then I can count! ..LOL and I can count pretty high!
Even if you uninstall the LILO there will be no MBR cause LILO overwrites the last MBR that was present.

Thanks but I got it sorted anyway.

I booted from the XP CD and went to recovery console. Typed 'fixmbr' at the prompt and it reinstalled it. I followed some instructions given for Windows 2000.

Another question on the same subject. I now have LILO on the linux disk but it won't boot into windows. It just goes to 'Loading Windows' or something and just stays on that screen doing nothing. At the LILO setup to add a DOS / Windows entry I entered '/dev/hda1' but it doesn't work. Could this be because the windows disk is NTFS and not FAT?

Nope I have a WinXP + Slackware + LFS system going on here...
are you sure you habe the right partition set in lilo?

And if you ran the XP bootCD it should have killed lilo and placed windows's entry in the MBR.

there's nothing in /dev/hda1 to boot-- use /dev/hda ( that's where the MBR is - not in the partition)

Right, extrasolar on the "other" line it should say /dev/hda