Mandrake likes my HD and won't let Win98 on

Hello guys,

Been awhile hasn't it? Servers have moved, sites have merged and it's a great day for knowledge.

I installed Mandrake 9.1 awhile back on my gaming rig with the intentions of never using Windows again. Well...now...I want to use windows STRICTLY for gaming and use linux to surf the net and such.

The reason I chose W98SE for my windows is well....because it's the only Win cd I have access to, unless one of you guys can get XP from your college and ship it to me for under $20 or so bucks.(I got munney, jut not alot of it) Anyways, I believe it's Lilo loading when I boot from the CD-Rom with the Win 98 cd in it and giving me an "L 99 99 99 99 99 99 etc etc till it fills the screen and prompts to reboot with the same thing happening.

I made a boot disk for Win 98, BUT I think my floppy drive has gone south.

Any Ideas?

That would indeed be messages from LILO. However, since you get those messages, you are not booting from the CD (unless M$ has decided to go with LILO on their CDs lately... I think not =) ). Have you checked the boot sequence in your BIOS?

My BIOS actually asks me what device I want to boot with and I choose the cd-rom with the Win 98 cd in it.

Well, I can just say that apparently, it isn't booting from the CD, since it boots LILO. Check your BIOS and see if there's another way of choosing which device to boot from.

Let's face it. As soon as you install Windoze it's going to sh*t over your MBR, so why not do that now. Boot off a Windows/DOS floppy and then enter

Code:

---

fdisk /mbr

---

Which will stop Linux and Lilo having a look in. Then get your Windoze installed, then re-install either LILO or GRUB (see the tutorial section on GRUB and getting it back if you loose it).

Of course what you want to do first is make sure that you have a Linux rescue diskette that works (test it), then it should be easy to get access to Linux back once you installed Uncle Bill's delight.

have fun

Nerderello