Having had some previous problems installing Linux in a dual boot configuration (having lost all my data) I decided to take a more secure approach this time. I disconnected all hard drives except the one I was installing linux. I then installed Mandrake Linux 10.0 and got pretty much everything up and running. After this, I reconnected all of my other harddrives. Linux is on a 40 GB hard drive, Windows XP system files on another 40 GB Hard drive, and a 160 GB RAID-1 for data.

My plan was to use BIOS to change boot order to switch which OS I was booting into, i.e. boot from the Linux hard drive to go into Linux, and vice versa for Windows. I really do not like lilo and did not want to use this to select the boot OS, as I want my windows partition to be "stand-alone" and the same with the Linux disk.

Apparently, this is where I went wrong. When I try to boot into windows it works just fine, but when I try to get into Linux I get:

"The super block could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem" followed by some other suggestions. Then the next paragraph says:

"Bad magic number in super block while trying to open /dev/hde1 Failed to check filesystem" and then it asks me if I want to repair. I do not, because hde1 is the hard drive that has windows on it, and hdf is the Linux drive. I tried booting from the Linux CD and using rescue. First I used the option to mount all partitions, and then went to /mnt/etc and edited lilo.conf to accurately describe the root location (hdf instead of hde). In this file it says to run lilo after you edit it. However, I cannot run lilo. Even if I change directory to the directory that contains lilo, it still gives me "bash: command not found" when I try to run it. I try running echo $path to see what the path is, and this does nothing. I try running su first and I can't run this command either, even if I change to the directory that contains it.

I do not want to attempt a reinstall because that will conflict with the problem I had in the first place, potential data loss. If I disconnect drives and reinstall Linux, then I'm quite sure I will have the same problem when I reconnect my drives. I would appreciate any help from you Linux pros.

You need to alter etc/fstab to reflect the filesystem as it is now. its probably pointing to /dev/hde1 when you want hdf. the same as lilo.

Thank you for taking the time to answer. After spending hours trying to fix this on my own, your post got me into linux in about a minute.

Oh, and now that I think about it, in case anyone has a similar problem:
What I did was edit the file fstab by replacing each occurence of hdex (hde is my windows drive) with hdfx (hdf is my linux drive) and when I rebooted, all was well.

Glad I was able to help, and welcome to Linux