I have a Sony VAIO laptop on which I have accidentally screwed up the MBR and or lilo conf. The laptop was originally configured for me by a certified Linux guru to be a dual boot (WinXP or SuSE). The condition of the machine now is that I can not even get to the lilo screen. It comes up and says LIL- and hangs.

The problem is that on this Sony VAIO because the cdrom and floppy drives are in the docking station and the interface from the docking station to the PC is via firewire which is not supported, I can not try to repair by booting from a CD or a floppy. When I do it gets only so far and hangs up.
The original installation was done as a network install. Because LILO hangs up I can not even get windows to boot. I can however get windows to boot from cdrom. I have two specific questions:

1.) Can I boot windows via cdrom and while in windows somehow repair the MBR and or LILO config files?

2.) Can I have a Linux boot image or LILO rescue (bootable image) on a USB drive and plug that into one of the USB ports on the PC, boot from that and then repair the damage?

Are either of these viable solutions or is there another better way to fix this?

Thanks,

Marc

First off your BIOS needs to support USB booting. Most new ones do.

Now as to whether or not you can actually boot linux... not sure. If you're pretty comfortable with linux you could probably build a kernel that could load and start via USB.

can you use the fix mbr option from the windows cd? it will fix your MBR so that you do not have to load windows of a cd but i do not think that it will fix your lilo boot loader. just a thought!!