I just loaded Mandrake Linux 9.0 and loaded the lilo boot sector on hdb but when the installation was all finished and rebooted the WinXP Pro booter just boots in to it's normal.

I tried using the boot floppy created during the instalation but it is not recognized as a system disk. Is there a way to maybe "fix" the problem on the boot disk in Windows?? and maybe point it to the hdb5 where the "/" is located??

Any help is appreciated.

Mandrake 9.0 looks to be pretty darn nice so far. Detected and configured my dial up and my Matrox Dual head G550 card. But 'boot in' issue is a bit of a problem!!

Thanks very much

Richard

You said lilo went to hdb, that's not the active primary partition where it is supposed to be, is it? If you were able to boot with the floppy, lilo could be reinstalled... strange that it didn't work..

One thing that acyually might work, is to install some third party boot manager under windows. PQBoot, that comes with partitionmagic, might recognise lilo and boot linux.

\nomen

In all honesty, I would recommend using LILO as the boot loader. I know there are many methods of getting windows to boot linux. I have tried a couple of them with limited success.

Letting LILO boot windows and Linux seems to be the best method. There are a lot of people out there who are cringing at my saying this. Fear not, you can make a back up copy of your Master Boot Record (MBR) from linux very easily.

From the linux prompt, logged in as root, run this command. It is not going to hurt anything. All it is going to do is copy the first 512 bytes of your primary hard drive, which is the master boot record. Here it is:

dd if=/dev/hda of=mbrbackup.lnx bs=512 count=1

This will copy it to mbrbackup.lnx so if the lilo installation fails, you always have your original MBR.

Now just reinstall lilo, usually by just typing liloconfig and install it to the MBR. Hope this helps. Let me know if it goes well.

-Weaver

Woops, I didn't really even answer your question. My bad. The above post you can use ONCE you get into Mandrake.

First things first though, how to get back in. You should be able to just stick one of the cd's in and reboot and boot from the cd. I have never been through a mandrake setup, but with other linux distros you are presented with an emergency boot menu where you can pass parameters in and do an emergency boot. What it does is boot from the kernel off of the cd and mounting the root file system off of your hard drive. From there you can install lilo properly.

-Weaver