lock mbr

[febisfebi]

i dont have a floppy drive, and unfortunatly i need to install windoes on a small partition. i know from past experiences that windoes will delete my mbr. is there a way to like lock the mbr so it cant be messed w/, or is there some other way to not let windoes do this? :mad:

[demian]

Originally posted by febisfebi:
<STRONG>is there a way to like lock the mbr so it cant be messed w/, or is there some other way to not let windoes do this? :mad:</STRONG>
I doubt it.
If you have a burner you can make a bootable CD and use that to boot into linux after windows wiped out the mbr and then reinstall lilo.

[febisfebi]

i have the redhat 7.2 install cds, if that helps. is that what i need. if so how do i recover it?

[demian]

Originally posted by febisfebi:
<STRONG>i have the redhat 7.2 install cds, if that helps. is that what i need. if so how do i recover it?</STRONG>
Yeah, that could work. What I mean is, however, that you could burn your own CD with a kernel image of your system, put that in the el torito image (or whatever the name is) and have it boot your system.
Anyway try to boot with the RH CD and see if at some point it gives you the option to boot an existing system from the hard drive. This should happen quite early in the "installation" process. Else you can try to pass the option root=/your/rootfs at the lilo prompt to get to your system.

[slapNUT]

Use the Install CD#1 to boot. Then select the rescue mode or type rescue at the prompt or something like that. Once you are into the rescue filesystem it's easy process.

mount #This will show you if/where your linux partition is mounted.

If it is not mounted then go ahead and make a mount dir
mkdir /linux
mount -t &lt;fstype&gt; /dev/&lt;hdpartition&gt; /linux
cd /linux
chroot /linux
lilo -v

else if it is already mounted then

cd /&lt;linux mnt point&gt;
chroot /&lt;linux mnt point&gt;
lilo -v

That should do it. I only used rescue once or twice but it works great.

[febisfebi]

ok this sounds good.
but i use grub.
what is the command to load grub back to the mbr (like lilo -v)

[knute]

Another way to do it would be to use loadlin, and simply boot windows to the command prompt and run loadlin from there to load linux and restore your boatloader.

To get windows into the command prompt, hit &lt;F8&gt; when you see the loading windows flash on the screen... It will be right after the bios is finished and you get that beep... A menu should come up, then you can choose Command prompt only or Safe Mode Command prompt only (Only difference between the two is whether autoexec.bat and config.sys get processed or not).

Then change to where you have loadlin.exe and I'm not sure if you need any more images or not, as I've only used loadlin to install debian.

[slapNUT]

I think you just type grub, or if you like a little feedback then it would be grub --verbose. You can try man grub or better yet info grub for more reading.

[Molecule Man]

I assume the RH works similiar to Mandrake. If you type rescue at the boot prompt, it should boot to rescue mode. It will hopefully detect your linux installation which at that point, type chroot /mnt

This acts like you booted your Linux install to single user mode. I'm not familiar with grub so go to http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Multiboot-with-GRUB.html