HELP! Boot Record Gone?

johan the olive · 02-21-2003, 07:07 AM

it should be free considering i can get a much better os for free... anyways, in the boot conifg on mandrake what will happen if i change the boot device from hda (what it is now) to hdb? currently, it's using graphical lilo. i wish i could dump windows forever...

johan the olive · 02-21-2003, 10:00 PM

sry to do it but i need help

bump

fancypiper · 02-21-2003, 10:15 PM

Re-reading your posts, it would probably be a good idea to download and run Memtest86 overnight with the extensive tests before doing anything else on that box.

Have you bought Windows 2000 and do you have the CD in hand? Can you access the administration/rescue console and run fixmbr or fixboot using it?

Windows 2000 Recovery Console

Electro · 02-22-2003, 07:03 AM

Memtest86 may say all your memory is fine. Windows usually displays blue screens because drivers are conflicting with each other. You have a copied version of Windows 2000 so this is another reason your computer is showing blue screens. Windows 2000 CD has special sectors embedded that can not be copied correctly. You can get Windows 2000 with a new barbone system or with a new processor, memory, motherboard for half the price.

Mandrake default bootloader is not LILO. Its GRUB. The user can always change to LILO during installation or after. LILO can display the menu in either a graphical form or text form. If you have selected expert, LILO or GRUB won't install in the first place. Mandrake asks the user "do you want to install LILO....."

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I installed mandrake and it screwed over my red hat installation and did something to my boot loader for windows which isn't good. any way to get it back?!?!

I'll bet you didn't read the warning message that comes up before starting installation in Mandrake. In your case, Mandrake assumes you are overwriting your Redhat partitons. Mandrake (programs) is only as smart as the user.

Installing two LINUX distributions gets little tricky. You need to hide the partitions so that Redhat's root does not get confused with Mandrake's root. In LILO or GRUB, you can hide partitions but I don't remember how.

Quote:

not sure who to follow... i want to get back to old windows boot record or remove the one installed by mandrake so that i can format the slave and not have the boot loader it installed screw over my computer so i can't use it.

Find information on LILO or GRUB about booting into Window 2000. There is plenty of information about this on the internet.

Quote:

i want to wipe the slave, install mandrake and end the problems. how do i go about this with this boot record ordeal? thx

First do you have any files on your Windows 2000 partition that you want to keep. If so, mount the Windows 2000 drive in Mandrake. Then copy the files to disks. Next insert the Mandrake CD and delete all partitions. Then create linux partitions. After about 25 minutes or so, you will have Mandrake 9 installed on the whole hard drive.