LILO has fried my system PLEASE HELP

[brento73]

Ok, I installed Mandrake 7.1 on my second hard drive, and now when I start my computer I have two choices at the LILO prompt, linux and windows. If I choose linux, everything is fine. If I choose windows it gives me LIL- and then stops. I have to restart the machine to get anything to happen. Also, when linux is comming up, I get errors as it tries to mount hda(windows), and get the same errors if I try to access it through the X desktop.

Here's all the details I can think of:

PIII 450
SBLive
Viper 550
unknown MB
256MB RAM
hda is 8Gig, has always had Win98 since new
hdb is 6Gig, was extra FAT32 drive, then FreeBSD, now Mandrake 7.1
Error is 'mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda1, or too many mounted file systems

I uninstalled LILO (lilo -u) and now I get an error message from the bios warning that the boot sector has been altered, and the choice to go ahead or abort. No matter what I do at this point, I end up back at LIL-, and nothing else.

I NEED MY COMPUTER! If I could get my files out, I wouldn't mind fdisking and reinstalling windows, but the only way I can get to 'C:' is to boot from a DOS/Win floppy, and I don't have any way to back up large amounts of info. I need help! I can't get to the files from linux, and I can't get windows to come up. I'm on my KNEES here. If anyone has any ideas, please let me hear them.

Thanks in advance,

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Brent O'Dell
MCP and Linux Newbie

[This message has been edited by brento73 (edited 13 October 2000).]

[mdwatts]

Your /etc/lilo.conf is not setup correctly. I can suggest you have a look at the NHF's here as there are answers to setting up dual boot, LILO, 2 HD's etc.

[brento73]

Hmm... didn't help. Now hda won't boot at all. I have to use a Win98 boot disk to get into DOS if I want to do anything with the first HDD, or a linux boot disk to get it to boot into linux. I can't really see any option other than to pull out the drive and put it in my friend 98 machine as a slave drive. At least then I should be able to pull out the data I need before I FDISK the bastard and reinstall. Oh well.

[RoySmith]

have you tried fdisk /mbr from your dos boot disk? doing that may allow you to boot windows from the hard drive and linux from the floppy. 'course, that assumes lilo was installed to the mbr of hda. if you can boot into linux, use fdisk to see what's marked as boot partition; it may be incorrect.

[brento73]

I did fdisk /mbr from DOS, but it just made it totally unbootable. I'm about to say phuq it, and just wipe out the drive. I needed to clean windows up anyway, it was getting a bit flakey(no!... not WINDOWS!).

[RoySmith]

if you can run the linux fdisk on hda, check to make sure hda1 (if that's where windows is located) is set as a bootable partition. if you can get the machine to at least boot to windows this way, then you can maybe get into linux with a boot disk and fix lilo - or even do it all at once if you get into linux.

[brento73]

Well, I decided to just wipe out hda and reinstall Win98. I have to say it runs faster now that it has almost nothing installed http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif

I haven't messed with putting LILO back, so I'm using my floppy to get to linux. I may just keep it that way, so I don't have to do this again. I still can't figure out what exactly happened.

Actually, I should try putting LILO back now, while I don't have much to lose.

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Brent O'Dell
MCP and Linux Newbie