what happened was on my one is i did made a 7 gig of partition for linux and i was trying to make a dual boot with winxp pro by installing mandrake 10. everything went very well and as well as booting but then i did not like the madrakes boot loader and i thought only way to remove this would be booting in windows and deleting the partition.... and also it was keep saying that i have a boot virus on my pc..... and i am sure that i don't have...... guest what then.... i did delete the partition and then i try to re boot but however this time i could not even boot on to any OS !! ! ! !! !

can you Imagen how do i feel. i did not have any 2nd PC for me to boot it on that that as a slave and try to back up the data but for get it.. i had to do a hard format which means i had to erase everything. don't ask me about back ups because they did not work either. i have lost about 50GB of data in 45 min.... whole my school assigmnet my coursework and whole other staff are gone. and now i can not even recover my files back to life.

but guys i am not giving up i am going to learn this linux....even if i do have to format my PC as many distros as we have for linux........ now is there any linux version that don't have a boot loader because i know that windows itself has got boot loader.???????

now i am either going to buy a 10 GB HDD and install linux on that or got to find a linux distro that don't have about loader... guys please help me out on this i really don't know what to do up here.........

All oses have some sort of boot loader, AFAIK. You need to learn how to use it. It is very simple. Your data is not lost, or wasn't lost because of the bootloader. The data was still there. See this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=218780

To keep it accurate, and in perspective, LILO is a powerful/flexible bootloader - it can be as straightforward as having a stanza like this in /etc/lilo.conf to have Windows booting quite happily alongside your Linux distro - just as an example:

other = /dev/hda1
label = "Windows"
table = /dev/hda

A quick search here should reveal a few threads on dual booting and configuring LILO appropriately.

maybe i did explain myself in incorrect sentese. the boot loder did not made me to lose data.... becuse of the boot loder after i have delete the partition i coudl not not boot in to windows..... that is what i menyt.......


thanks you for that advice mate i am going to have a look for teh LILO software right now......

hi
so u r stuck at ur boot loader

get urself a win98 floppy/cd
boot into it
#fdsik /mbr

and voila!! u should be done with windows

OR
boot with win 2000 CD
in rescue mode
#fixmbr

regards
gaurav

Just to clarify, I was offering information for future reference. The thread that I posted a link for described how to repair the MBR so that one can boot into Windows. In other words, the hard reformat you said you did was unnecessary! But I concede that maybe I am not understanding your problem. No offense intended, but it is difficult for me to understand your English.