I initially had debian installed along with windows on my machine. I had a lilo bootloader w/ windows on my C drive and my D drive was aprtitioned with a linux partition and an ntfs partition.
I made the mistake of deleting the linux partition and resizing the ntfs partition to take up the free space w/ partition magic.
Now I can't boot up my comp anymore, the bootloader doesn't show up, instead i get a black screen with "L 80 80 80 ...." . I think to be able to resolve this problem I need to format the MBR, however I don't have a floppy drive on my laptop is there any other way of doing this? or fixing this issue

thanks a lot

you need to re-install lilo... you can do this from a live linux cd... also, sometimes your distro's install cds will have a rescue mode which will allow you to re-install lilo from them... basically what you need to do is mount your linux partition (the one with lilo.conf in it) and then run lilo in a chroot like this:lilo will re-write your MBR using the /mnt/somewhere/etc/lilo.conf information...

i forgot to mention, since i deleted the linux partition, whenever i run cfdisk now, whenever i try to create a new partion on one of the hd's it tells me that the partition is in use...it doesn't show me how much free space is left as it should. I'm not actually sure what the numbers that show up are under disk capacity b/c they aren't what my hd's max capacity are. I think it is actually showing how much room is used that's why im not able to create any partitions.
therefore i wouldn't be able to mount any partition, should I just look for a live cd which has a rescure mode?

rats... okay, if all you have is windows right now you can get it back by booting the windows cd and using the recovery console to repair the MBR:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/d...d_tro_ldau.asp

where are you running cfdisk from??

i was trying to install slackware, and you can issues commands from the console or whatever you wanna call it before calling "setup"...i guess a dos boot disk would work to, too bad idont have any, im gonna give the windows cd a shot, thanks for the help so far

i used fixmbr, and everything is wokring fine again, thanks a lot for the help!