problem with HDD's
 

Ok i installed lindows on a 3rd hard drive and i have windows on my first. I had to unplug my second hard drive which is NTFS i use it to put movies and games on WindowsXP. well i plan on having lindows on this third drive so i can plug it in when i need lindows. but when i unplug it and put back in my 2nd NTFS hard drive for windows, while the computer is booting up right before the windows load screen would typically come up at the bottom of the screeen it says LI and it stops and windows doesnt boot up. Now when i plug back in the Lindows hard drive i can get on my first hard drive with MS WindowsXP on it but i stil cant get onto my second hard drive where i have everything fun (because can only have two hard drives plugged in at once.) so how can i just take the lindows hard drive out and have everything boot up normally with MS WindowsXP?

The reason you can't get to your "movies and games" drive from the Lindows drive is because when you installed the Lindows drive the movies and games one wasn't there - so obviously Lindows only recognised your first Windows hard drive - I'm not sure how its done but you need to take the Lindows bootloader from your MBR and soemhow hope that the XP bootloader is still intact. If you want to try Linux and use XP at the same time try partitioning your 1st hard drive to contain a main c XP partition then a d "movies adn games" partition then on your second hard drive install a Linux distro.

The trouble is you have LILO on the master boot record, and when you remove the Lindows drive, it can't find the lilo.conf on the now-removed drive, so it can't boot an OS.

First, boot to Lindows, and create a bootable floppy. " mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 kernel-version " is the command you will need to run as root. Of course, replace with your correct kernel version number. 2.4.something Boot from that to make sure it works, then move on to step two.

Second, use Windows to restore the master boot record. It used to be " fdisk /mbr ", but might be under disk management or something similar in XP. I'm not running it, so I can't tell you. This will restore the MBR to boot the first partition on the first drive, which will be XP. You'll need to use the floppy to boot Lindows from then on.

ok thanks for all the help ill go do that now

ok sorry for being such a newb and all ...but how do i figure out what kernal version to put at the end of the run command. AND I LIVE IN WISCONSIN TO ranger nemo ..jsut felt the need to say that anyways so if some could tell me that would be handy

You can get the version of the kernel you are running with the command...

uname -r

I compiled a custom kernel earlier this year when I installed RedHat 9, so it returns "2.4.20". I would use...

mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 2.4.20