Remove LILO from WinXP Mandrake Linux Dual boot

[quo_vadis]

Hi,

Installed Mandrake 9.1 on a partition with WinXP as the main OS. Although the installation was fairly straightforward I had the following issues with it.
1. Mandrake seems to insist on providing a boot loader...even with a boot floppy option.

Basically what I wanted to do was to keep XP as the main OS and use a floppy to boot into Linux. However Mandrake does not seem to provide this option at all.

Now to the main issue. In the installation I specified the boot device as /dev/fd0 thinking that this would install the boot loader to the floppy and would allow me to boot into linux as I wanted. However the boot loader LILO was loaded to /dev/hda and now I have to make a selection at boot-up to get into windows.

Could someone tell me how do I go about removing LILO from the MBR so that the system boots directly into XP without providing any options?
And then how to install Mandrake so that I can use a boot floppy to boot into Linux without touching the MBR.

I am quite the Linux Newbie, so please pardon the long rambling. I am really desparate to remove LILO (without using the XP CD since I dont have access to one) I have currently deleted all the Linux partitions but LILO still seems to be there.

Any help will be very highly appreciated. Basically I need to get my system behaviour back to before installing Mandrake.

Thanks and regards,

[Dolda2000]

The thing is that you can't just "remove" LILO, since it has overwritten Windows' boot loader. However, I believe that LILO backs up the previous boot sector before it installs itself. Boot into mdk and see if you have the file /boot/boot.0300 or any similar.

[Arkas]

I had tha same problem when i first installed mandrake so here is what i did.
Find a win startup disk (any win version) and put it in during boot.
When you get to prompt A:> type fdisk /mbr
This way you return back to the previous state of the mbr (if that was the win xp autoboot).

[Dolda2000]

No! You must _never_ run "fdisk /mbr" on any version of WinNT. If you're unlucky (which isn't too uncommon), it will remove all your NTFS partitions.

[pcmanjon]

Here is the cure all.

My win2k install cd has a Recovery console

My XP cd had one too if i'm noit mistaken

After it loads all drivers, it'll say press ENTER to install or R for recovery options

HIT R
then do something or another (forget what you do) to get into a recovery console (just follow the instructions!)


then once you do it may ask for a pass for administrator

then at the prompt type

fixmbr

it'll warn you could loose everything on the drive... i've fixed my MBR thousands of times this way though and never lost anything yet, so , I think it's realitivly safe!

[Dolda2000]

Yes, I know that, but the thing is that he didn't have access to the Winbloze CD.

[joesysop]

Oh... I see

[pcroft]

if you dont have the XP cd then your pretty much out of luck in restoring the NT loader. But Why not use Lilo/Grug to boot windows too, if it's a case of wanting windows to be your default OS you can configure that easily from within linux so that windows will boot automatically instead of linux.

[Dolda2000]

I still don't think that you are out of luck, since I believe that LILO backs up the previous boot sector before it overwrites it. Did you check for the file /boot/boot.0300?

[Arkas]

I use the fdisk /mbr all the time and nothing happened to neither of my two ntfs partitions! I use it everytime i uninstall a linux distro that i don't like and believe me i installed many of them.
Well i don't know about removing all the ntfs partitions if you use the command (never happened to me) but i guess i've always been lucky! :P