I have known how to edit menu.lst and I am comfortable doing that. It is easy.
But I have a simple question. One that I never thought of before until I had a small problem when I used Harddrake to play around with my partitions. If one needs to re-install the bootloader with the first disk of Mandrake 10.0 Official, by hitting the f1 key and then typing in rescue. Then re-installing bootloader.. Does it read the fstab to know what it is installing? Or is there another file it reads so it knows? Just curious.



Webwolf

If you re-install the bootloader from the CD, it'll install lilo and it'll *probably* just re-install lilo so that you can get Mandrake up and running. I say probably because when I did this it re-installed correctly but didn't detect my other Linux partitions - which were listed in the /etc/lilo.conf file. You'll probably have to add any other partitioning info by hand when you're back in Mandrake.
It will however list and load any windows partitions you have.

The reinstall boot loader option is a kind of the same thing as selecting the default options during a normal install. The scripts may be buggy. I say this because "Restore Windows Boot Loader" fails on a 2-MBR hardware setup and I end up doing dd if=aldebaran.img of=/dev/hda manually.

So it reads lilo.conf only then? Does it read fstab or anything else?



Webwolf

As I said, the Reinstall bootloader option should do the same thing that's done during the install process when you are presented with the default options for the bootloader, including a default bootmenu. It basically seeks all HDD's fr primary partitions. It then checks their type, which is generally a Linux Native or a Win partition. In the latter case, the tool adds a windows label to that partition followed by a number (so if you have a total of 2 primary windows partitions (not necessarily containing the /Windows dir) the tool ads windows1 and windows2 as options for the bootloader).

With the Linux partitions is more difficult... there are lot of files, so it checks and searches for the /boot directory (either in a standalone partition or as a /boot dir in a primary partition).

This way your default boot options are created. Or, at least this is how I would've done it . The principle is the same. Why read data (posibly corrupt) from an existing install when you ended up booting from a rescue CD? Could it be because the user screwed up something in the config files and can't get the bootloader? So, the "failsafe" way would be to simply copy-paste the auto-detection routines from the installer to this tool, so you know you got more chances to get it up. LILO is used because it's considered failsafe. GRUB is more picky with the BIOS