i succesfully installed mandrake 9.1 and am having a problem with my system. I am using windows me (ugh...) and linux. I think i have done something horribly wrong. I had red hat on my system but thought that i deleted it. I installed mandrake fine and dandy and put it in the partition where red hat previously was. everything SEEMED fine but then i booted my system and got the red hat os selector. Unfortunately, only dos and red hat showed up, no mandrake. So then i figured that i should get rid of the linux partition altogether and reinstall mandrake (since i no longer have a need for red hat.) i went into windows and used fdisk to *supposedly* remove the linux partition. I then exited fdisk and norton 03 game me something like this message "Some virus like activity has been detected, do you wish to continue?" i figured that norton thought the partitioning was virus activity, so i clicked continue and rebooted. I boot up and got grub version 0.93. i am having EXTREME difficulty figuring this thing out. I give it this command:

boot dos

and it says make sure the kernel is installed blah blah blah. it wont let me boot linux or dos. Am i using the wrong command? What command should i use? have i seriously screwed up my system? please help me


PS i have been unable to boot any os since my partitioning!

get a windows boot disk and boot with it type fdisk mbr or /mbr i cant remember the exeact command but there must be a option in mandrake install to overwrite the old boot loader and install new one. or use mandrake rescumode and reinstall boot loader

Yes you have a mess. Boot your Mandrake disk and use the expert mode to re-format your linux partition and load Mandrake.

Fdisk /mbr to clear the boot loader. Use entire linux partition to overwrite previous installs. I was getting a similar problem and used Partition Magic 7 - I created a fat32 partition then used PM 7 to convert it to a Linux partition - I then installed to that partition and all went well.

ok i did that fdisk thing and i am now able to boot windows. I figure that i would be best off deleting the entire linux partition to get it back to just one huge drive. then partitioning, and then reinstalling because there appears to be a fragment of red hat left on the hd that i want to get rid of. Is this a good idea or is there an easier way?


anyway, thanks alot for your help!

If your partition table and disk usage are good, there's no need to repartition. Just reformat - I don't understand why Mandrake wouldn't do that on install. I'd only repartition if you're not happy with the partition table itself. By 'fragment of RH' I assume you mean files, rather than a small partition or fragmented table?