Dual boot Win/Linux boot error L?
 

hai all,

I have a 20GB HDD with Win 2000 on its c: drive, a 8 GB HDD with RH Linux 9.0. I want to make it dual boot.

I have put *GB as primary Master and 20GB as secondary slave and edited the lilo.conf file od Linux HDD, have re-run lilo, it gave me a warning that "Your BIOS driver cannot be read or seen or so).. Okey..

I booted it, It boots without any probz into Linux but at Windows booting stage it stops saying :
"Loading"
L?

I have tried all the possiblities that i kown, thats changing the physical HDD setting to Sec Master or Pri Slave .. and making the respective corrections in lilo.conf , re-run lilo..

Using lba32 instead of linear in lilo.conf

If what i beleive is true, Since, the MBR has been over-written by Linux, i am not able to boot the Win2000 HDD seperatly too.

I tried a Win2000 rescue CD to boot through, that too didn't result any good.
I did
dd if=/dev/... of=bootsect.lin bs=512 count=1
then
mounted Win: C;\ , and copied bootsect.lin to C:\
where /dev/... is my "/" partion of my Linux HDD.
--Invein



Now,, The question goes like this
1) Can i rescue the Win partion out so that, i get back to my original state with Windows to boot on one m/c and Lin to boot on another m/c.
2) Or can i go foreward doing some magics and get my problems solved in from this state to get a dual boot system.

I am sure of the lilo.conf syntax..es, I have doubt reg. the waring message which came regarding the "BIOS driver" (only once when i was usinf Windows as hdd).

Thanks in advance

Hi Johndy,

This help was written for WIN98, but it applies to your situation. If you have not done anything to your Windows drive, it is all still there. Try to avoid any formatting actions until you are absolutley sure what the situation is. Try this short help:

http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Booting..._Problems.html

Of course, have a beer. It sometimes helps.

Hi Jondy!
I've encountered this before as well and found out that for some strange reason, LILO didn't install fully (or correctly) so it cannot complete it's instruction set. My suggestion is to reinstall it which you should be able to do without having to also reinstall everything else. Just skip to the bootloader section of the installer.
As ProfJohn said, all of your partitions and data are still there, just unable to get to it until you repair your bootloader.
Hope this helps,
J