box goes 'boom' , please help

limpimpin · 01-22-2002, 11:30 PM

heres my situation...
i have winXP on my master, i loaded mandrake 8.1 on my slave, everything was good for about a week, even all my hardware worked... i would get lilo and choose my OS. but now, when i try to load linux all i get is a "Loading Linux......." message that never loads. and if your wondering my winXP still works fine.

any suggestions???
thanks,

DMR · 01-23-2002, 12:13 AM

I guess the obvious question is: what has changed recently? Have you modified your hardware, altered your partitions, edited system files, had a bad crash, etc.?

If you can get into Linux with a boot disk, you might try just re-running lilo and see if that restores it.

limpimpin · 01-23-2002, 06:12 PM

i changed nothing... just rebooted and it wont boot... and the boot disk give and "invalid boot disk" messege , is there a way to just reformat the entire drive and reinstall linux on it from scratch???

finegan · 01-23-2002, 06:26 PM

Hmmm... did you make a lilo boot disk during installation? If so, you can use that to get to the Mandrake partition. Then try and re-run lilo, with the root command: 'lilo'

Hopefully it won't give you an error about the drive geometry being doinked, which is usually what's wrong when it fails to uncompress the kernel (what would have been next after Loading Linux........).

Cheers,

Finegan