| sounds to me like something is messed up with your MBR (master boot record). So you are trying to use LILO to boot? Make sure that it is installed in the first 1024 cylinder mark of your hard drive or else it won't boot correctly.
Another thing you might consider doing (that is if you checked that LILO was installed properly, is using a third party boot manager, it is what I do.
I already had WinXP running perfectly on partition one of my first hard drive. I then made a linux partition using partition magic (i also made a swap partition). Then I installed boot magic (part of the partition magic package), and activated it. Then i rebooted the computer with the mandrake cd in the drive, and installed mandrake. When it asks you about the boot manager, INSTALL IT IN THE ROOT FOLDER OF LINUX!!!!!!! THIS IS IMPORTANT!!! Once linux is installed, reboot the computer and choose windows, and configure a linux choice in the boot magic configuration (this is in windows xp). Reboot the computer , and you should be able to boot into either system. If you choose windows, it will boot into windows. If you choose Linux, it will go to Lilo, and then you can just choose linux from there, and it works fine. Hope this was some help. | 
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