Boot problem - help!
 

Hi all,

something just happened, and I'm very concerned.

I have a dual-boot, Win2K and Mandrake 9.0 machine. Everything has been working well until last night. I booted into Win2K and the it said "Loading NT" and hung.

I can boot into Linux, and my data partition is completely fine.

So my question is: is Lilo misconfigured? I have copied out the lilo.conf file below.

If it is not Lilo, does anyone else have any suggestions?

Thanks for your help.
Matt.


boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
default=linux
keytable=/boot/us.klt
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
ignore-table
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux
root=/dev/hda2
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi quiet"
vga=788
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=linux-nonfb
root=/dev/hda2
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=mount hdc=ide-scsi"
read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label=failsafe
root=/dev/hda2
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append="devfs=nomount hdc=ide-scsi failsafe"
read-only
other=/dev/hda1
label=NT
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/fd0
label=floppy
unsafe

LILO mini HOWTO
Multiboot with LILO HOWTO

Configuring a bootloader

# Mandrake links
Mandrake home page
Mandrake Users website
Easy software management: Red Carpet
Maximum RPM
rpmfind

:eek: Sorry, I must not be able to read :o

Was your partition table modified somehow? As far as I know, when you use table= you need to reload LILO every time the partition table changes.

fancypiper,

He's not using grub so how is that suppose to help him any ?

matthewD,

Its not a problem with lilo as it actually gets past the lilo stage to start the load for Windows 2000. Most likely there is some sort of corruption with your Windows at this point if its hanging. Do you have some sort of Windows Rescue disk of some sort ? Does it give you any time or option to try to boot into safe mode at all ?

Also if you do think it might be Lilo, and if you have a rescue disk to boot into Mandrake, you can always do a:

fdisk /MBR

And then if it loads Windows, use your Mandrake disk to load Mandrake up to reload lilo for your dual boot.

This is risky but could work if everything else fails.

Another possibility is that your Win2k partition was somehow changed to be a hidden partition. The version of LILO distributed with Mandrake 9.0 will not be able to boot a hidden partition.

Do you use any partition managing programs besides what is already in Linux, like Partition Magic? Be sure all your partitions are not hidden, and if that doesn't work, try setting up LILO again. If that doesn't fix it, then I'd say I'm out of answers.... ;)