Hi All,
I have recently attempted to install mandrake 8.2 on a 40gb box with windows xp already on it. About halfway through the package installation (i selected a bunch of non-default packages - silly me) my machine seemed to freeze. About an hour later i rebooted.

....only to find that know i get the beginning of the LILO boot loader working,it shows LI but no more, the floppy drive continually makes noise and nothing else comes up. Im guessing that the boot loader half installed or installed badly or something.

Is there any way I can boot windoze so that I can format the linux partition and start again. ie: is there any way of circumventing the lilo boot loader.

I have windoze boot disks but they ask me if i want to rescue or install windows but XP is fine its just linux and the boot loader thats stuffed.

any ideas???

marty

Your rescue disk will allow you to overwrite LILO with the windows XP boot loader.


digital_dreams said, on another thread:
If you muck up your mbr you can always restore it using the windows XP installation cd - Repair utililty - command FIXMBR.

I've never touched windows XP myself, but that sounds very logical. In older versions of windows you could boot to a commandline and use fdisk /mbr, but I suppose that's not in XP.

Hi
When you simply install mdk 8.2 again, you are able to
setup and format the linux filesystem. I know this option is at least available if you choose expert.
The Diskdrake thing takes care of the filesystem . You dont need to go back to XP for that.
But the freezing thing, might be your burned iso, did you
check before install ?
regards

Strange. My husband downloaded Mandrake 9.0 and burned the iso to CD. When I tried to install it, my install also froze in the middle of installing packages (I tried this 2 times and it happened both times...gave me some errors about the cd). I did a hard shutdown cause I couldn't get out of the install and started over with RH which installed fine, but the boot disk wont' work.

When I boot into Windows, I can browse the CDs just fine.

I went home last night and booted in useing a win 98 floppy boot disk. Then i used fdisk /mbr (much like what someone suggested here) and sure enough it worked. XP now boots up so tonight i can re-format the partition and re-install md8.2.

thanks for your help guys/girlz,
im sure i'll be back here soon

Marty
tryin hard to not be a

Hi, I was snooping around for any problems other folks had before I install Mandrake 9.0 and ran across this thread. If you go to reinstall 8.2 and you install crapps out again, I would take a long hard look at your CD drive. I had problems with 8.2 where it would fail with some message (I don't remember the exact phraseing) at various stages on install. I would reboot and start the install over only to have it fail again (usually somewhere near the end of CD#2 of the download version). It turned out that my CD drive was failing.

The MD5 sums checked out so I thought at first I had burned some bad disks.

Mike