Firstly thanx to those that replied with help.

Yes i can only assume the lilo boot parttition was on my master hdd & now after reformat & reinstall of new o/s's i have lost it. Yes i can boot into it from a boot disk but how can i add this boot sector again.
When starting machine it used to go to lilo where i could then press enter to go to Linux or type dos to go to boot loader. This is how i idearly want it

Can i do something now that i am into Linux??. This is the information i can give about current setup

Please see next posting for shell details on lilo..

Regards

Andrew

[root@echelon /root]# df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb5 6073056 2685720 3140580 46% /
/dev/hdb1 27987 4977 21406 19% /boot

[root@echelon /root]# /sbin/lilo -v -v -t
LILO version 21, Copyright 1992-1998 Werner Almesberger

Reading boot sector from /dev/hdb5
Warning: /dev/hdb5 is not on the first disk
Merging with /boot/boot.b
Secondary loader: 8 sectors.
Syntax error near line 12 in file /etc/lilo.conf
Removed temporary file /boot/map~

This is my lilo.conf file


boot=/dev/hdb5
read-only
prompt
timeout=50
vga=normal

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19-6.2.12
root=/dev/hdb5
label=linux
append=

other=/dev/hdb1
label=dos
table=


Thankyou once again for any help..

Wow, hold on a sec, in your lilo.conf the entry for dos is pointing to /boot partition (no good), run as root
/sbin/fdisk -l
to list all the partitions, locate one which is FAT32 or NTFS. BTW what is the second OS, Win9x/Me or NT/2000/XP?
then you will have to substitute
other=/dev/hdb1 to /dev/hdXN learned from fdisk, it might be /dev/hda1, and rerun lilo to write it to MBR.

Hi Neo

master is a 20 gig IDE 12gig win98 & 8gig Win2000 slave is 6 gig Linux..

jester

As neo77777 said, as root run /sbin/fdisk -l to get a list of your partitions.

To get lilo to work again, you'll have to change the boot= line to boot=/dev/hda and run /sbin/lilo. This will put lilo into your mbr.

The error you're getting around line 12 is the fact that the table= line is incomplete. It would probably look like this table=/dev/hda.

So your lilo.conf would look something like this:

boot=/dev/hda
read-only
prompt
timeout=50
vga=normal

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.19-6.2.12
root=/dev/hdb5
label=linux
append=

other=/dev/hda1
label=dos
table=/dev/hda

Thanx everyone. I am back up & running

regards

Jester

You're welcome.

How did you get it working?