Now, I had RedHat 8.0 with no problems, until a friend came with Mandrake 9.1 -- I decided it was worth the try, and installed. It eventually crashed during installation (when configuring the Video card), and even as i tried different combinations of options in each different installation (I installed Mandrake like 3 times)... So I ended up getting back to my RedHat disks.

I installed, without any problems, and logged into RH. It worked fine and all. Then I reboot, trying to enter WinXP....

booting dos...
rootnoverify(hd0,4)
chainloader +1

along with a large amount of 99 (half the screen was filled up of those numbers .... nice message. It asks to press enter, I do so, and it gets back to GRUB...

Anyway, I tried RH again, and it boots fine... Now:

Aparently, lilo is still in the mbr.

You can remove lilo from the mbr with
/sbin/lilo -u
You can remove grub or lilo from the mbr by booting with a Windows 98 boot floppy (at the prompt, type fdisk /mbr), or by using the Windows XP Recovery Console

I think redhat uses the command grub-install to install it.


Instructions on basic installation: Installing a bootloader
Multiboot with GRUB Mini-HOWTO

Check that /boot/grub/grub.conf has the proper partitions in the stanzas.

# How is the hard drive partitioned
fdisk /dev/hd<X> -l

Hmmm...
I don't have much experience with GRUB but you might see if you can boot from the RH cd and install LILO instead. That may fix the problem, if RH will give you that option.

I doubt your XP partition is messed up, but what probably happened is that Mandrake didn't update GRUB and somehow messed up its configuration... Or updated it wrongly.

See if there's a way to install Lilo instead of GRUB to your MBR (master boot record). Lilo should configure itself from the RH install cd and sense your partitions, and where each OS ' root partition is.

Try that, or post more details of the configuration....


_shade

Thanks, here's some more stuff...

There is a lilo in /sbin but no lilo.conf, so when I type /sbin/lilo -u it tells me that the conf file is missing and stops.

Apparently there's neither such thing as a grub-install nor grub -install... (I typed it at different dirs and everywhere I got "There's no such command".

This is my grub.conf... what the hell means that coment? All I understand is that that're the instructions that linux follow to boot.

# grub.conf generated by anaconda
#
# Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
# NOTICE: You do not have a /boot partition. This means that
# all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /, eg.
# root (hd0,2)
# kernel /boot/vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/hda3
# initrd /boot/initrd-version.img
#boot=/dev/hda
default=1
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd0,2)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
title Linux (2.4.18-14)
root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-14 ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.18-14.img
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

## END


Thanks again for all your help, if you know anything else, help is welcome ,
GodFoca

Is there a Red Hat 8.1 release? I don't see it on the Red Hat site.

While in Linux, ensure that lilo has been removed

/sbin/lilo -u

Then, re-install grub.

Red Hat 8.0 documentation: Installing GRUB