Lost Lilo
 

I use Mandrake 9.2 at the same time with win98 and winXP on multiple partitions sustem. I had lilo installed and booted from a floppy disk but I am not able to do that any more (could be the floppy). Is there a way to restore access to my Mandrake without reinstalling it? Now I use Partition Magic 8.0 booter for my system, but I do not have Linux :-(

Thanks

if your linux partition is intact you dont have to reinstall. Im not really familiar with lilo nor partition magic booter, only with grub :( Normally u can use your distro cd to boot your sistem, by typing at the cd boot prompt by specifying where your root partition is, but i dont know the specifics for mandrake

another way is using knoppix to repair your sistem

The first install disk is also a rescue disk. Press F1 for more options and enter in ´rescue´.
You will get a menu option and one option is to re-install boot loader. Since you were loading up from floppy, you might want to have a floppy disk handy.

Or you could select the options to load the drivers, and to mount your partitions. The root partition will be mounted under /mnt. cd over to /mnt and check that they are. If they are you can enter ´chroot /mnt´. This will change the root partition for this shell so ´/´ is now root. Then enter bash -l. This will start a bash session and load in the startup scripts for the root user. You may need to insert a floppy disk and mount it at this point. I´m sorry, I don´t know if a dos-type floppy will work, or if you need it formatted with ext2. For a normal floppy, mount it as:
mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
Then type ´lilo´.
This will write the boot sector to floppy disk.

There is a script called mkrescue. Try ´mkrescue --iso´. This will produce a rescue cd .iso file which you can burn and use instead of a floppy.