Yes gentlemen .... and ladies.... I've found it a computer that will not install windows. Which really sucks in this case.
Situation. One of our employees got a set of Mandrake 9.0 disks from me, and took it home to install on her box. It's already running win2000. Well the first install she messed up somehow at the end (Not sure what she did but it wouldn't boot.) So she did the windows thing and re-installed it. ... ooops. Seems the first time she put lilo on the first partition from a set of disks she had. (I think she said it was 8,0) and the second was from the 9,0 and she put lilo in the mbr this time.... Linux went in like a dream... works great. problem is when she tries to boot into Win2000 .... the lilo on hda1 (her win2000 partition) locks up and won't accept keystrokes. ugg. Try to install win2000 again and let it repair itself.... no dice .. the dang box will not boot from the 2000 CD (tried 2 different ones that work on other boxes) nor will it boot from any of the recovery CD's Nor can win98 install or winXP. Linux works fine. Now to the question. What is the file on hda1 that would be the file that provides the lilo boot loader. If I could remove that file the lilo in the MBR would be able to boot windwos. Can't restore with lilo -u because the second install overwrote the first installs mbr backup. So all I can get with lilo -u is the hda1 lilo coming up and locking up. (2 keystoke max...) Turns out DOS and NT boot disks/cd's don't recognize her cdrom or cdrw ... so they can't load them up. I would like to know what the file is though to remove from hda1 to destroy the unwanted lilo boot screen. Plan right now is to hang an older cdrom I have off of the box long enough to re-install windwoze and work from there. BTW Mandrake caught 100% of the hardware on this box without a problem. James
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