Hi all,

I have a tripple boot system with win98, win-nt and corel linux1.0. The system was working fine until yesterday. Yesterday I installed perl5.8.5 under linux. I tested the installation, tried few coding, everything was fine. I shut down the system. But today when I tried to start the system, it is not booting. LILO is failing. It did find the bootsector in disk0..But stops on a black screen with LIL followed by blinking cursor. Before it used to bring corel linux screen with options to load linux or windows follwed by the ntloader giving option to load win 98 or winnt. But now it is not working. My system is e-machines desktop using intel pentium III 600 MHz, 512 MB RAM. Any idea how I can go ahead to fix this problem. Thanks in advance for all help.

Augustine

I dont think perl is causing your bootloader to fail.
I think you should just reinstall the bootloader. If you have the distro cd there should be an option just to reinstall the bootloader, instead of a full installation.

IF there is an option to install the grub bootloader you can try that one out to see how you like it. If not just reinstall Lilo.

I don't know your distribution, but does the install cd have a recovery boot option? Or can you boot from a boot floppy?

If you think that lilo has changed, if you can get to a shell then your old lilo file before it was changed is lilo.conf.old . If you suspect that lilo is corrupt you can overwrite lilo.conf with lilo.conf.old
Both should be in /etc I think
as root
cp /etc/lilo.conf.old /etc/lino.conf

Sounds like you are only getting part of lilo loaded. The boot loader part is on the MBR of one drive, maybe the .conf part is on another?

I would try to boot from the recovery part of the install CD