The best thing to do if you fear boot problems, but don't have a floppy drive is to download a LiveCD such as Knoppix, MandrakeMove, Mepis or SLAX (see
DistroWatch for details on these distros) and keep it handy as an emergency Linux boot disc (in case booting from Slack's Install CD1 rescue function is not useful/helpful in your situation). From such a CD, you can boot into a full Linux desktop that runs from the CD rather than your HDD, mount the installed partitions, and use the
chroot command (read
man chroot for more details) to edit the installed system's files as if the installed system was running.
There's no need to reinstall... not Linux, anyway. Windows, maybe. Did you have a long PM batch session going that did not complete? That's the usual reason for such errors with Partition Magic. Each drive being repartitioned needs a reboot before it is processed, and PM will demand going through its entire batch file before it will say that it has completed (either successfully or not) and will release the Windows boot process to its normal function by removing the batch file with the previous instructions.
So it's possible that this incomplete process has borked the Windows partitions in the first place, but in case it has not....
In addition to the "set partition active" strategy given above, you might want to consider adding a
table= entry to your
lilo.conf as well.
From
man lilo.conf:
Quote:
PER-IMAGE SECTION
A per-image section starts with either a line
image=pathname
(to indicate a file or device containing the boot image of
a Linux kernel), or a line
other=pathname
to indicate an arbitrary system to boot.
In the former case, if an image line specifies booting
from a device, then one has to indicate the range of sec-
tors to be mapped using
range=start-end
In the latter case (booting another system) there are the
three options
loader=chain-loader
This specifies the chain loader that should be
used. By default /boot/chain.b is used. The chain
loader must be specified if booting from a device
other than the first hard or floppy disk.
table=device
This specifies the device that contains the parti-
tion table. The boot loader will not pass parti-
tion information to the booted operating system if
this variable is omitted. (Some operating systems
have other means to determine from which partition
they have been booted. E.g., MS-DOS usually stores
the geometry of the boot disk or partition in its
boot sector.) Note that /sbin/lilo must be re-run
if a partition table mapped referenced with `table'
is modified.
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Basically, as well as setting the Windows partition as active (bootable), you also need to tell LiLO what partition the Windows boot files live on.
Hope this helps.
