Hi,

In case some of you experts don't like visiting the newbie forum, I am moving my question from there to here.

I installed Mandrake 9.0 recently. In fact, I've installed it no less than 5 times in the past two weeks.

Everything works great, except the boot loader.

OK, this is what I have, a Pentium III 733, w/ 256 MB of RAM, two HDs. HD1 is a 9GB FAT32. HD2 has two partitions, first partition(20GB) is FAT32, and 10GB remaining for Linux. I am duel booting Win2k pro and linux.

When I first started I was using LILO, then later I also tried Grub, but both gave me the same problem. Every time I cold boot the machine, I would get a string 010101...s on the screen and it would just hang. Hitting the reset button for a warm boot would solve the problem.

I tried to get around this nonsense by writing the LILO MBR into a file, restore NT MBR and call up the LILO MBR file from within the NT boot loader, SAME SHIT!!!! The only benefit I got out of this is that I can now do a ctrl-alt-delete for warm boot rather than hitting the reset button.

I am running out of ideas, and this is getting old and frustrating. And nope I would rather not rearrange my HDs.

Please send help!!!!

Additional Info:
IDE1 primary is HD1
IDE1 secondary is a DVD
IDE2 primary is CDRW
IDE2 secondary is HD2

Why are they like this? Because that was the only way I could fit my cabling in the POS Dell case.

That is your first mistake as we don't allow double posting. http://www.linuxquestions.org/rules.php

If you wanted it moved or felt it belongs in another forum you report it to a moderator and they'll see if it needs to be moved. Your original thread in newbie is fine where it belongs. We don't need the same questions asked in multiple forums by the same members.