URGENT!!! I've screwed up more than eveer before!!!
 

I need help now more than ever before..I don't know what I've done to my computer..

Heres what happened:

I'm running a dual boot. First, windows XP, then mandrake 9.1, then I just installed slackware 9.1.

Before installing slackware, I edited lilo.conf and changed the slackware resolution from 791 to 788. Didn't bother going back into slack before I would reinstall it on the same partition.

So I reinstalled it, restarted the computer, and then clicked on slack in lilo.

It said that the slackware EDBA was too big.

I restarted the compter. It went into the pheonix bios and said that system memory appears to have changed. I restarted again. Instead of lilo, there was a blinking underscore at the top of the screen. I restarted again -- same thing. It has the default dell bios going, but instead of lilo it loads nothing.

Worse yet, I tried reinstalling lilo with the mandrake rescue thing. It still did the same thing.

PLEASE HELP :cry:

please do not mark threads as urgent, you may be having problems you want to fix asap, but so does everyone, and questions are answered on a purely voluntary basis.

Sorry, but I really need to get this fixed before my parents get home

I don't know what the heck I did but going into the bios, not modifying any settings (at all!) saving exiting and then restarting somehow fixed the problem.

Halleluja:D

Does anybody know, out of curioucity, what the heck I did?

"Does anybody know, out of curioucity, what the heck I did?"

You dodged a bullet. :)

The slackware EDBA error happened to me a while back..all i did was reinstall lilo..


Can you boot any cds or floppies?

I dont know if this will work but..you can try it. You can go into your BIOS and set default factory settings and save changes. Reboot your computer and see what happens. Something in the BIOS might have changed that isnt allowing your computer to boot.

If resaving the bios setup fixed the problem the most likely it was a bios glitch or possible you changed something in bios?

Resetting the bios defaults can resolve quite a few h/w issues.

Thanks. All is well (to my exreme joy) :)

I didn't have to modify or reset ANY defaults in the bios. All I did was enter, and upon exiting, I saved the non-existant changes. After that, everything worked.

What an adventure. I have to say, it would have royally sucked to reinstall windows, slackware and mandrake. And having borrowed knoppix to a friend for the weekend, I would have lost all of that precious data too.

Now I'm not a major newbie, but this was one hell of a wakeup call to the problems that they must be experiencing. Even in mandrake