messed up MBR

[oliwally]

I have had exactly the same situation as psyro. Two hard drives, one with xp one with Mandrake 10. I also had things messed up badly. After trying to get rid of Linux I was not able to boot back into XP.I ended up wiping everything and starting from scratch (ouch).

So my situation at the moment is that all works well (Lilo, XP and Mandrake) and Mandrake is on a second HDD. But I need to uninstall Mandrake and wipe the second HDD for various reasons.

I would like to try out the lilo -u command but I'm really scared that it will mess things up again and I will have to reinstall windows once more.

Can anyone confirm that the lilo -u will indeed restore my XP MBR? I can't afford to mess it up again

[multiosusr]

The lilo command I would give in this case is "lilo -t".
The "-t" stands for test and will not change the current mbr.
When you do give this command look for "FATAL:" in the resulting message.
Only "lilo" (without the "-t") will change the mbr.
Another old fashion lilo command that may give some good info
is "lilo -v -v -v".
If the "lilo -t" command gives error then correct it. Dont run any other
lilo command until problem is fixed.
e.c.

[rodb]

from long experience, i have found that yoper, at end-of-install, fails to update the mbr ( lilo )

so, for every install of yos ( 2.1.0.4 and including 2.2.0.6 ), rather than exit-and-reboot as prompted, i first just run 'lilo' with no parameters, and it does the job, success every time (except for below!)

note: i have multiple win2000 partitions, and lilo includes them all - so just edit lilo.conf and remove all the other partitions, except the win2000 boot partition - this is the only one that will boot win2000/winxp - the rest leave you hanging(!)

rod

[rodb]

from long experience, i have found that yoper, at end-of-install, fails to update the mbr ( lilo )

so, for every install of yos ( 2.1.0.4 and including 2.2.0.6 ), rather than exit-and-reboot as prompted, i first just run 'lilo' with no parameters, and it does the job, success every time (except for below!)

note: i have multiple win2000 partitions, and lilo includes them all - so just edit lilo.conf and remove all the other partitions, except the win2000 boot partition - this is the only one that will boot win2000/winxp - the rest leave you hanging(!)

rod

[bill98765]

Got this prob, but have found a quick fix, at the mo quick routine to get round and gain access to operating systems!

All you need to do is to select boot from CD in bios and leave the a SUSE or winXP Bootable CD in the drive, when bios asked for a keypress to boot from CD ignore it and you get the multiboot options back, It aint clever but it works!! Dont really want to start messing with mbr etc till all data is backed up Error occured after using partition magic and installing, window64, then SUSE 9.2

Hope this helps will investigate the error and post any fixes when I get time

[LinuxNewbie7]

Already tried that, said it was fixed but still would not boot XP. Even after a fix with fixmbr windows won't boot from a clean install unless I run maxtor,s util. to wipe the drive clean, go figure.

This sounds to me like a hardware problem with your Maxtor drive. I have had issues with boot sectors in Maxtor drives before.

I have a maxtor drive and didn't have any problems like this.

[techieMoe]

This sounds to me like a hardware problem with your Maxtor drive. I have had issues with boot sectors in Maxtor drives before.

I have a maxtor drive and didn't have any problems like this.

As is true with any hardware, your mileage may vary. Note I didn't say *all* Maxtor drives have this problem, just the one I bought.

[dsethuraman]

looks like i had the same trouble like the rest.

here is my installation: a amd 1800+; 20gh hda ( maxtor) which had win$low$ ME on it, a 80gb wd hdb which has a elx linux 4.0 on it and was dual booting with grub ; 256mb ddr. decided to get rid of winslows and did a install of yoper on hda wiping all winslows partions. the installation went smooth and installed lilo to mbr. but when i reboot, only a screen with 'L ' followed by numerous '9' and nothing more works. so i did a reinstall and instead of lilo installed grub, but not better result: only a screen which said grub and did nothing else.
so i booted back to my elx linux with a boot floppy and reinstalled the grub from it onto the mbr in hda. now i can boot the elx linux but even after i edited the grub.conf and put in the details for the yoper, if i try to boot to yoper, only a message ' file system inconsistent' comes and refuses to boot.
anyone who can help please?
sethuraman.

[dsethuraman]

on the same subject, i attempted a reinstall on hda installing grub on mbr, with no better result. i reinstaled grub from my elx linux on hdb and manually edited the grub.conf file to try to boot into yoper. but attempted to boot to yoper only elicits a file system error message and does not boot. the grub.conf file on mbr and the /etc/fstab file from yoper are posted below. i installed yoper on ext3 partition rather than rf.

/etc/fstab
# Begin /etc/fstab

# filesystem mount-point fs-type options dump fsck-order

/dev/fd0 /floppy auto rw,exec,noauto,users 0 0
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom/ auto ro,noauto,users,exec 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom supermount fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/cdrom,--,ro,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts gid=4,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda2 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/hdb3 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/hda3 /home ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdwriter supermount fs=iso9660,dev=/dev/scd0,--,ro,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

grub.conf file:
# Generated by grubconf-0.5
default=0
timeout=10
splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title ELX BIZ (2.4.20-8elx)
#:2 <-- type: 0 => linux, 1 => windows, 2 => other
root (hd1,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.20-8elx ro root=LABEL=/ hdc=ide-scsi quiet vga=791 video=vesa:1024x768@70
initrd /initrd-2.4.20-8elx.img
title=Yoper GNU/Linux 2.6.8.1-3
root=(hd0,1)
kernel=(hd0,1)/boot/yos root=/dev/hda2 vga=791 splash=silent
initrd=/boot/initrd-2.6.8.1-3.img
title Yoper 1.0
#:0 <-- type: 0 => linux, 1 => windows, 2 => other
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.8.1-3 ro root=LABEL=/ vga=791 splash=silent
initrd /initrd-2.6.8.1-3.img

the elx linux boots properly from this grub, but yoper only shows file system error.
any help would be much appreciated.
sethuraman