5 gig Inspiron 4000 Laptop

two partitions of WindozeME and 1 partition (2 gigs) of Mandrake 9.

My internal CD rom drive cracked last week, so I only have an internal floppy to work with. I also have a working Ethernet card

I defragged both ME partitions last week (for fun) and, after I rebooted,
LILO went like this:

Li 99 99 99 99 99 99...

...ad infinitum. With a yucky double-clicking in the hardrive between each 99.

My main concerns are backing up the windows drive 'important' folders to another destop via netcat.

a) What are the simple steps to setup a tunnel from laptop to stable desktop(running redhat9)? Sounds like netcat is my only option--its only a gig of info maybe.
I am a major newbie and barely know what the commands mean...I am learning. (I am using tomsrtbt...bless you Tom...)

b) What steps do I need to take to try to see my windoze partitions one more time? I will be totally happy to just note internal configuration stuff on the windows partitions...then REPAVE it all to the distro of my choice...LiLo is hosed maybe? Is it easy enough (and worth it) to set up GRUB?

c)...and if it sounds like that old refurbished 5 gig drive is dying or already dead, let me know anyone. This is a 2001 laptop.

All help appreciated...

The situation may not be as bad as it appears. Have you tried booting into Linux using a rescue floppy? If you can successfully boot up in Linux, then it may simply be a matter of rerunning lilo. As root
Of course, there's certainly the chance that your machine is on its last legs, (you would be the best judge of that) but I'd say there is a good chance that the defrag is responsible for the sudden turn for the worse, and as long as you can sort out lilo, you may be able to return it to normal functioning. Good luck with it -- J.W.

Can I do this from my tomsrtbt disk? What folder would it be under? If I ran it from the disk's version of LILO, would that be enough? Or would I need to worm around and run from the hardrive's LILO?

Thanks...

I've heard of toms although I'm not familiar with it, but all you really need is to boot up the machine using a Linux kernel. Once Linux is running, you could become root, then issue the /sbin/lilo command, which will rerun the lilo program, which should restore your lilo configuration. In other words all you really need to do after the machine is up is get to the command line and then issue the command I listed. I don't know your level of experience with Linux, but this would be the equivalent of the DOS prompt in Windows. Instead of a C:\ prompt, you will see a # prompt. From there, just enter "/sbin/lilo" (but without the quotes)

If everything works successfully, you should be able to reboot and return to how things were when everything was working. If it's a total failure, your PC will just remain in the same state as it is now, so you are no better or worse off than you are now.

If the disk you're talking about boots up the machine under Linux and you can then get to the command line as root, then Yes, give it a try. You could probably even "borrow" a boot disk from another distro (such as Slackware) to boot Linux, although you may need to manually pass in the parameter to tell it which partition is your / partition. I haven't done this, but I bet it would work.

As I said, no promises, but I think it's worth a try. Good luck with it -- J.W.

When I try to run it as root, I get:

/etc/lilo.conf: No such file or directory


Any clues?
-v

That doesn't sound good. Are the contents of your directories otherwise OK, and not to ask a stupid question but you _did_ have lilo installed previously, correct? In other words, /etc/lilo.conf did exist at one time, Yes? -- J.W.

I was trying to run both the remounted file with its version of LILO on my harddrive and the LILO version that comes with tomsrtbt. I know the files are there but they don't seem to be running when I call them to. I am running from ROOT in Tom's root boot, but I don't know how even how to login to root in my old hardrive right now.

What about config files? Are there certain places to look to make sure LILO config/ or boot config files are in particular situation/setting? Again, no internal CD right now...only a floppy. That's where my tomsrtbt comes in. I am also trying to netcat/wget files to my desktop for safety.

/etc/lilo.conf did exist at one time on the harddrive. It had to have. I've booted into Linux and windows on that laptop many times. LiLO splash screen as well with pretty blue Mandrake marketing icon/trademark...

I think /etc/lilo.conf is also present on the tomsrtbt file directory as well...


Next moves? What are the steps? Any help appreciated...

Well I'm just not familiar with Tom's disk, so unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to offer any help beyond what I've indicated. To recap, you want to boot up in Linux, then navigate over to your hard drive. If there is a "/etc" directory on the floppy and you are navigating over to it, that's NOT what I'm talking about. You need to go to the /etc directory on your hard drive.

I have no idea whether your disk will mount any existing drives, but it's possible that it isn't -- if this is the case then you will need to manually mount your hard drive to a mountpoint, then you could access your existing /etc directory on your hard drive. From there you should be able to rerun lilo -- J.W.

Just for clarification, the /sbin/lilo also refers to the file on the hard drive, not the floppy. The idea is that you only need to floppy to get Linux running and from there you want to navigate over to your hard drive, and run everything from it. Hopefully this might help - if not, sorry, it's all I can think of. -- J.W.

thanks for all your help, JW. Something will work.