I have been running Windows Xp pro on my primary drive and Mandrake 10 for a little while on a small partition of my main HD (I have 1 80gig and 1 20gig drives). All of a sudden I got this bright idea to delete all my partitions ecept the large primary secton of my 80 gig drive. What I wanted to do was transfer all data from the 20gig to the 80gig so that I could use the entire 20 gig for linux. What I did was, I went into windows Administrator tool and transfered all data and then delete and re-ccreate neww partitions never thought to delete Linux before starting with this idea. Bad move. Now when I try and restart my system all I get one L and then rows and rows of 99 across my screen. Does anyone know anything about this and how I can correct it without having to loose about 60 gigs of data on my windows partition?

Insert your 1st Linux installation CD on your CD-ROM. Go to the rescue mode. Type the command grub-install /dev/hda. IIt will install Grub boot loader in your system boot partition. After that you can boot in windows and delete the partion which you dont want using fdisk using bootable floppy or starting the machine in command prompt

Manidip Chakraborty

Seems you need to re-install your boot loader.
This link will help you : http://evpc.biz/computing/Linux/restoring_GRUB

Just re-install Mandrake.
Looks like you intended for it to be deleted anyway. Boot from the Mandy disk, and install as normal - it will install the loader again, as it did previously. It will recognise the XP, and build a dual boot including both.

If you don't want to wait, simply boot the XP CD, and select "recovery Console". Run fixmbr from there, and you will have XP back - as if it was the only OS on your system. Re-install Mandrake at your leisure.

Edit: That is a lilo error folks - suggesting grub is only likely to bring more confusion.

I just want to thanks you guys for you impute and I will try this when i get home from work. On the subject of reinstalling Linux. What i really wanted to do was reinstall mandrake plus I downloaded a distro of Linux Suse and I want both on the 20 gig HD. My problem is when I try to boot from the Suse cd the system will not boot from cd. this has happened after downloading several other distros, they will not boot from the cd. Am i doing something wrong during the downloads or am I downloading the right thing. I am going to the download section of the main menu to find these distros.

wont boot from cd? are you downloading ISOs?
if thats so, you gotta burn it as an image using your favorite burning program (nero, K3b, etc). check your BIOS settings or better - if your BIOS has a boot menu where you choose which device to boot this time, and boot that way. otherwise use a boot manager that supports booting off a cd (System Commander 2000/8)...
i dunno what other problem it could possibly be...

you could try a live cd too - that would give you full permissions to your drives. And if the live cd fires up then you know your bios boot options are correct to boot from a cd, so it must be a suse distro that is wrong.

good luck.

Use your XP install CD go to recoverry console and fixmbr. Or fdisk /mbr will do it too.