I am a newbie at linux.... I have installed in two seperate hard drives Windows (primary hard drive) and Mandrake Linux 10.1 (slave hard drive). Last week I had a problem with windows and, after moving some important files my /home forlder in linux from windows, I reinstalled windows on my primary hard drive. But when I went to start up my computer again, my dualboot option from Madrake Linux disappeared... now only Windows boots. Is there a way to restore that boot option without reformatting my linux hard drive and reinstalling it? I don't want to lose any files I have in linux and (being a newbie) I didn't create a copy of the boot files on a floppy for such an occasion.

PS. I already tried the rescue option on the linux cd and it supposedly reinstalled the boot sector... but windows is still the only one that loads...

Boot cd in rescue mode. Get to command line. Mount your hd:
mkdir /mnt/hd
mount /dev/hda1[replace hda1 with linux partition] /mnt/hd

#chroot into partition, reinstall bootloader
chroot /mnt/hd
lilo



This assumes you were using the lilo bootloader. If you used grub then run "grub-install /dev/hda" instead of "lilo".

Here's a help file from LQ's own help files. Scroll down a ways to find the specific steps to follow.