help with boot loader
 

hi

i had a dual boot machine ... win xp and fedora core 1
i had installed windows first and then linux....
my windows got corrupted (nothing new) and i re installed the os... now i cant access linux at all ... it does not give me an option to boot to linux.
will i need to re-install linux.

thanks

Your distribution should come with a recovery cd which allows you to do that, it is a fairly common problem.

A 'manual' way of fixing the problem is to use a boot cd/floppy to access the hard disk and reinstall the boot manager.

[ Very quick: Download and write HAL91 to a floppy, reboot. At the prompt, mount your root partition into /mnt, also mount proc 'mount proc /mnt/proc -t proc', chroot yourself in. 'chroot /mnt /bin/bash --login', then re install lilo 'lilo', or if you used grub 'grub-install /dev/hda1' [or whatever your boot partition is. Logout of the chroot, unmount /mnt/proc, then /mnt, run 'sync' and type 'halt'.]

jmorse,
What does the command sync do?

'sync' writes anything in the disk buffers to disk. I had problems with HAL91 not unmounting disks and closing files etc when I shut it down, so I made a habit of running 'sync' before shutting down any computer.

It is probably completely unneccessary.

Just another ingrained habit!