Turn Off Lilo??

joc_06

Right here goes...

i had 2hdd's in my pc- one 40 gig with winxp pro and 1 80 gig with a 5 gig partition at the start for mandrake 9.2 and 75 gig of ntfs for files for use with winxp

I used lilo to switch between winxp and mandrake - grand no hassle


I got a brand new hdd recently and started moving all files off 80 giger as it's goin elsewhere. I then used partition magic to merge ntfs and ext2 partitions and format etc. forgetting about LILO.

I took out the 80 gigger and put in my new one as slave again to the 40 gig. Now just as Lilo starts a series of 99 99 99 99 scrolls across the screen at every boot up.

Grand says i, i'll just boot up mandrake and change it , so i put my old 80 gig back in and used LILo (which worked perfect) to boot into Mandrake but havnt i deleted all of the mandrake files already so i cant boot into it!!!

Now what do i do?? I dont want to format my 40 gig and i cant turn off LILo -

Can any1 help me???

fractal

Ok..

If I've picked this up right you now have copied Mandrake directly off the 5gig partition on the 80 gig drive directly onto another drive..

Reason why you're getting the 999's instead of lilo is that lilo is not actuall in the MBR (master boot record) of the boot drive any more..

To fix this you're best bet is to get a linux bootable CD like Knoppix or something. Boot into that and install lilo back to the MBR of the boot drive.. All should work then again...

Alternatively if you dont mind being stuck with just windows for the time being you could quite easily stick int he Windows install cd go to the recovery console and type fixmbr (i think thats it) and that will install ntldr (the windows boot manager)

That will at least give you one OS for the time being.

(Although I may have missed the point completeley )

joc_06

You are alittle bit off cue but thanks anyway.

Just finished clean install of winxp pro anyways so it doesnt matter...

Now i got 200 gigs of 7200rpm goodness!!

Cake Fiend

This is why BOOT DISKS are a good idea.

pickarooney

I've been trying to get a complete answer to this for aeons. What exactly do you do once you boot with the disk/CD?
In my case I want to keep LILO, as I've only got one OS (mandrake 9.1) but the 9999s annoy me.

slartibardfast

I personally would rather use a rescue cd, say with redhat or suse's cd1, which allows me to boot into a system where its boot loader has exploded. Then it is a simple matter of reinstalling lilo, with the command lilo. Of couse grub is far more common, its reinstalled with 'grub-install /dev/hda ' assuming you are talking about your primary master hd, grub relys of having a proper configuration in by default /boot/grub/

If you want rid of grub/lilo a good way to do it is with 'fdisk /cmbr x' when x is your disk number, in windows 9x/dos.

good luck