Hi First I have only used mandrake linux for 6 weeks a few months ago. Of those 6 weeks, I was sick 4! So...I know so little I can't fill a paragraph! First time I installed mandrake I had a nice boot manager that when I did a regular format I was able to get rid of. The second time though I had a low level boot manager which required a special low level format disc--which I did not have and had to pay to have it removed. Okay, one I either don't want this low level boot manager or I want to know in advance how to get rid of it before I format my disc as I am getting new computer in about a month and want to give this one to my son. He will not want to mess with linux yet. I am currently downloading 8.2 beta 3 as it advertises nice support for my all in wonder radeon graphics card. Thank-you. (hey if this is really nice my son may want to keep it! hehe)

I have 2 seperate hard drives. Linux is on it's on harddrive. And the last time I still had this boot manager when both harddrives were void of any os. ?? I see people are looking: anyone have any ideas? I actually loved this boot manager, but I need to know how to make it go away or eliminate it, if that is not possible before installing linux os. Please??

The boot manager was probably LILO, which is what Mandrake uses by default... or did with 8.0 at least. There are about 3 different ways to install LILO, the last of which I use constantly is probably what you are referring to... installing on the MBR.

Time out for acronyms:

LILO: LInux LOader
MBR: Master Boot Record, the first few sectors of the FIRST hard drive that BIOS will hand off to if its in BIOS's boot order.

That's why LILO wask on disk 1 when Linux was on disk 2. An MBR installation of LILO will put it on the very front of the first hard drive because that's all that BIOS is smart enough to hand the job off to.

I don't know why you had a problem scraping LILO off before... Typically if you install say... I dunno, Windows for instance, it will over-write the MBR in a heartbeat, format the whole thing... basically take over that disk's world if you want to let it. It shouldn't be a problem. If there is a problem, it might be a problem of boot order. For instance, if you have the order:

1.Floppy
2.Hard Drive
3.CDROM

Then if you pop in a CD, then it'll never get a chance to spin on boot because LILO on the Hard drive will get a chance to interrupt it. You might want to poke 'round your BIOS a bit.

Hope that clears some things up,

Cheers,

Finegan

I do understand what you are saying about the boot order. I sure wish I understood more how and why this happened? If I am remembering correctly I could not even install an os until this was removed- not with a floppy boot or even from a cdrom. One thing I did do that I figure was very incorrect was to put in the linux os cd and let the draketool ( i think it's called) format the entire disc and then did not proceed any further as I just wanted to erase this thing which I had so goofed up and re-install. But, alas, I couldn't. And seeing how windows was very corrputed(what a surprise eh? hehe) I went ahead and formatted this harddrive also. So, then I was stuck with 2 harddrives, no os but a boot manager??? I am now copying this os to cd's. Anyone have a low level formatting disc I might borrow?! hehe