unable to boot Mandrake or Fedora
 

I have Windows XP, Pentium 4, 2.6 GHz, over 1 gig of memory. I installed Fedora and grub. On boot up screen, there is nothing but the word "grub," beside which is a blinking cursor. There are no options available; I can't type anything on the screen; I can hit any key on the keyboard and nothing happens. The only thing I can do is reboot, and the same thing happens. This is not correctable by using rescue. I reinstalled many times with different configurations. I allowed the installer to configure automatically. I installed manually. I installed without a boot loader. I addressed a disk geometry problem. I downloaded another copy of the first disk. Nothing worked. I thought it might be a problem between Fedora and my computer, so I installed Mandrake. Again, there seemed to be no problems with the installation, but on booting up, the same scenario occurred as with Fedora, except rather than the word "grub," I had the letter "L." Any help you can give would be appreciated.

boot in to rescue mode and edit ur lilo.conf
ading a co0mmnet there lba32

below is a section of my lilo.conf

prompt
timeout=50
default=linux
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
lba32

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.5-1.358
label=linux
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.5-1.358.img
read-only
append="rhgb quiet root=LABEL=/"


this is due to our harddisk geometry

a\fter this
again get to the prompt run
#lilo

reboot and see if it works

also searching through this forum might have given u this advice much earlier


regards
gaurav

I was wondering where your windows XP went to.

Here is a nice instruction on how to use grub and what to do during the installation of redhat ( which is now known as fedora )

http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux...w2k-HOWTO.html

Thank you for your responses. However, I really am new to this. How do I gain access to the lilo.conf file after booting into the rescue mode?

hi
in rescue mode run

#chroot /mnt/sysimage



#vi /etc/lilo.conf

or if haven't used lilo earlier then
#vi /etc/lilo.conf.anaconda

save it to /etc/lilo.conf

edit and save it as /etc/lilo.connf
run
#lilo

regards
gaurav