Lost boot screen

[bobr2001]

Hi all. I was running a triple boot system, Win 98, W2K, and Mandrake 8.0. I was having horrific Win 98 problems (what a surprise, eh?) and did a reinstall. I now find myself unable to boot into Mandrake, the Mandrake boot screen is gone and my machine goes right to the Windows screen giving me the choice of 98 and 2K. How can I get my Mandrake back? Thanks...

[fateswarm]

You need several things to do in order to make this work properly. And basically, you need some info about your system. i.e. where is everything installed. I will write here a typican BUT hypothetical setup of this. Be aware, I assume it will work since I don't know much of your sustem.

First, you need a Mandrake Linux boot diskette.
.
Then, you need to reinstall LILO from inside Linux an the boot partition. I ain't writing this here.
Second, you PROBABLY need to make win2k boot loader to have two entries, the win2k and the win98 entries.

*IF*, this is done already (2nd part) then you only need to reinstall LILO and include the WINDOWS boot there.

You will then have to choices, Linux, and Windows.

By clicking on Linux, you'll get linux, by clicking on Windows you'd get the "normal" windows choices.


If you were more specific on the system you have, we'd be more helpfull.

[bobr2001]

My Linux setup was working perfectly, i.e. the Mandrake screen would appear and give me the choices booting into Linux or WIndows. This is what I lost when I reinstalled Win 98. Now all I get is the Windows DOS screen, do I want 98 or 2K. I checked my HD with Partition Magic and the Linux partition is intact. Unfortunately, I didn't have the foresight of making a boot disk.

I should also add that none of the data I have on my Linux partition is of any dire importance, I could easily do a reinstall without losing anything but a little time.

[bdg1983]

Try booting from your install cd and at the prompt, enter

boot root=/dev/hda#

Change # to whatever your Linux boot partition is.

You can also get bootdisks from www.bootdisk.com (http://www.bootdisk.com)

[DMR]

Basically, the Win98 reinstall overwrote the information that Mandrake's bootloader (I'm assumng lilo) had put in the Master Boot Record. As the other's have said, you'll have to boot into Linux and rerun lilo to write the proper info back to the MBR. If your /etc/lilo.conf file is still intact, this shopuld be pretty straightforward. Also, there is an NHF on Triple-booting Win 98, NT, and Linux (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/osbooting/tripleb.html) which might be a useful reference.

[bobr2001]

Thanks folks, I'm back up and running. Just had to get the lilo back.