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I have installed Linux (mandrake 9.0 ) on one hard drive and I have windows XP install on another hard drive. I configured lilo to see the windows XP drive, but when I select XP from Lilo it boots me to a blinking cursor. Anyone have any idea's why this is happening and a possiable fix.
silly question time. You have told LILO that XP is on another hard disk?
Told you it was silly.
can we have the output of "fdisk -l" and "cat /etc/lilo.conf"?
First things first: If you dual boot Linux and Windows (any flavour) on separate hard drives, then you MUST have Windows on the first drive. This is due to some terrible anti-social behaviour involved in the Windows boot process whereby it will simply refuse to play ball if it's located anywhere other than on the master drive.
Solution: Have Windows on your first drive (that's /dev/hda in Linux) and Mandrake on your second drive (/dev/hdb). Install LILO to the MBR of your Windows drive, and you're laughing. It's quite easy with Mandrake 9.0 since it's got such a nice installer and should recognise your partitions automatically.
what Davidoff404 is true. Two ways around it are :-
1. Use GRUB instead of LILO, as this can do a bit of virtual disk mapping
or
2. Change your BIOS settings so that the boot order is the XP disk first then the Linux one. This would also entail putting LILO onto the mbr of your XP disk.
Of course all of this assumes that you have XP on your second disk and so it is a "Waaaaahhhh! , I'm a microsoft OS and if I'm not on the first disk I'm going to scream and scream and scream til I'm sick" kind of problem.
:wink:
have fun
Nerderello