About reinstall windows xp
 

Now I am running two os on my computer. And I use lilo.
And my windows has more and more problems recently.
I want to reinstall my windows xp, so I would like to know what will happen after that, what I need to do for booting these two os again after reinstalling windows.

Thanks a lot.

I have no experience with dual booting with XP, but with the older Windows OS's it was enough to have a linux-bootdisk, boot with it after installing Windows, mount the linux partition (if your bootdisk didn't do that allready) and run lilo.

Test the procedure before reinstalling windows... just to make sure.

Windows will replace your MBR (where lilo is probably stored) for sure. You have two possibilities then.

First is to do what MarsDude wrote in previous reply. (very simple and effective :))

Second (little bit more complicated, but possible) is to use windows boot manager to boot both OSs. But you have to prepare for this before reinstalling windows. You should move lilo from MBR to root partition and save bootsector of your root partition to a file (using dd) and store it somewhere (e.g. on floppy). Then after windows reinstallation it is possible to configure windows boot manager to boot your linux using that stored file.

BTW, using this procedure you can boot any OS using windows boot manager. As alternative to dd on linux, you could use dskprobe.exe on windows to save bootsector.

Sorry, I forgot to say that I don't have a floppy drive on my computer.

brm, for your second option, what is windows boot manager?

Also, is there any way that I can boot to my linux after reinstallation without using floppy? For example, make a bootable CD rather than disk so that I can boot my machine.

cheers

you can use the second slack cd and boot from that all and then run lilo

Floppy was meant as an example. You can store it anywhere else. Only condition is, that this file must be available somewhere after your windows reinstallation. Anyway, if you use dskprobe.exe (should be part of windows support tools or can be downloaded from internet), you don't have any problem.

Well, I am not sure, whether there is something really named "windows boot manager". Windows also has something like lilo to boot OS. And it can be configured to boot anything else. There is file boot.ini on your C: partition (it is hidden file). This file contains configuration of "windows boot manager".

If you are really interested in this option, I can write more details. But it is probably easier to configure lilo or grub (especially if you often do some changes). Using lilo or grub you don't need to save bootsector to file or do any similar strange things :D

Thanks, THEHERO. This one works perfectly.

Also thanks to brm, I am very appreciated to your help.

For this case I would like to use third party boot manager. The one I have used is "BootStar" which is quite good.

oops, I thought it was ok, but now I have reinstalled my windows already, and I use slackware cd 2 to boot the computer, and I mount my file system to a folder, however, it is probably I boot from a dvd rom and when I run lilo, I have error, something like I can't write to the disk(dvd rom), the system will treat my current file system as dvd rom. Any idea how I can fix the mbr?

thanks a lot

do you just log in as root and type in lilo in a terminal