James Sparenberg wrote: > I've found it a computer that will not install windows. Which really > sucks in this case. > 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.
It could be an "active" partition issue. No windoze version will tolerate more than one "active" primary partition, while linux pays no attention to this concept and sometimes will happily make an additional primary "active". > 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. I don't think it is a question of a file to "remove". The problem is the partition boot sector, which needs lilo replaced with the standard windoze version. With w9x, this is simply booting the rescue floppy to do 'SYS C:'. In W2K, I don't think there is such a thing as a rescue floppy. You'll probably need to find a different CD reader that will boot the W2K CD. When you boot that, there is a menu option "repair an existing installation". If you choose that, it brings up two more choices, "recovery console", and "emergency repair process". The latter is probably what you need. -- ". . . . in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you . . . ." Matthew 7:12 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://members.ij.net/mrmazda/partititioningindex.html
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