what's the point of a **BOOT** disk!
 

so, i have a dual boot box with winxp on the primary hard drive (seperate physically) and slackware 9.1 on the secondary. I repaired my MBR with the XP recovery console because i couldnt get to windows and i need it right then and there. well, LILO is gone, but that's okay because I have a boot disc! goooood......or not! I put the floppy in and turn on the computer. when it reads the disc I get the message: Boot Error.
Really? i hadn't noticed...thank YOU for the descriptive error. any thoughts?I was thinkin of just reinstallin slack since i dont have much on there anyway but if this were to ever happen again and I need that stuff, I'd be screwed. Not to mention, it's too easy to simply reinstall...n00b way out and im aspiring to be more than that!! (not very well, though...)
thanks a lot

ps - maybe I should try re making the boot disc? how could i do that?

maybe try booting with disc 2 and repairing lilo?

firstly, thanks for the reply.
I've killed my windows partition so many times with many ditros. while ive had success with lilo, it is unnecessary for me to put it on my MBR. i want a floppy because its all i need, i dont care to have it done of the HDD, just one more thing to go nuts on me. in this case my MBR is safe and sound and thinks Gates rules my computer (FAT CHANCE)
thanks again.

Hello,

no, you don't need to install LILO into the MBR, you should take the boot sector of your linux partition instead! Then you can copy that sector with "dd" to a file and put a reference to this file into the "boot.ini" from XP. You can easily find more about that by googling a little... ;)

cu

hp_tux

pyre

time for my 2 cents worth.

Have a look at the imaging of partitions at www.partimage.org
this program (application) is on various demo (RAM) cds including knoppix.

When you take an image it takes an image of mbr at the same time, neat eh?

2) There are lots of posts on how to fix grub or lilo bootloaders. In my humble etc, grub is easier to fix than lilo.

3) whenever you use a ms repair tool for mbr one should always expect the mbr is no longer the same but with grub you put grub into mbr once and then EDIT only the /boot/grub/menu.1st file (other linux may call this file grub.conf)

anyhow have a search of posts with keywords lilo and slackware etc or slackware and grub and see what you think.

No one is going to force you to use one and not the other, but that does not stop me from making recommendations. If thats not what you want forget I speak.

i posted to an open forum expected anyone to reply with anything to help, so thank you for that. I dont use GRUB bc during installs with various distros it seems GRUB is unfavored and furthermore, appears to be less and less included with distros (ie slack 9.1). I really dont see why they are different in the sense that each boots up the OS of your choice. I ended up takin the cheap way out, re-installing, I wanted to redo partitions anyway. I tried loading up the slack disc and in the welcome screen it said to try something like: if in a pinch, try issuing this command: root = /dev/hda1 ...... i think i screwed up the command and only did hda as opposed to hda1 oh well...live and learn? i dont know what happened though bc all was well except i re-did the MBR which, in theory, should mean i only needed to use the boot disc....which failed. i dunno, i prolly did something along the way. but thank you for the responses, believe it or not, they WERE a big help.
quick Q, what is different between LILO/GRUB? why choose one over the other?

thanks again

I don't feel qualified to differentiate lilo and grub, but with regard to booting from cd or floppy and the root=/dev/hda... thing, I doubt if hda1 is what you want. If you have a typical dual boot installation, hda1 is probably your Windows partition; hda2 is probably swap, and hda3 is usually /. You probably want to type the following at the "boot:" prompt.

Substitute hda3 with whatever your root partition is. The "ro" is read only.

If your boot disk is pooched, you can use Install CD #2 as someone has already suggested, and you may have tried. Other option is go into Windows, download a boot disk image from Slackware FTP server, and use the RAWRITE program to create it. There are a number of boot disk options on the server. You can probably get away with using the bare.i kernel.

Hope that helps...