LILO and NTFS

[toddhd]

Hey all:
I just installed Mandrake Freq #3 on my laptop - the main parition has Windows 2000 on NTFS. I told the install to *NOT* install LILO, but it did anyway. I'd prefer to boot Linux from a boot disk.

Now I'm screwed. You can't FDISK/mbr an NTFS partition. I don't know how to restore my book sector so that it just goes to Windows 2000. I have LILO set to go there anyway, but still, I'd rather not have LILO at all. Any ideas?

If we could just avoid the inane OS flames just this one time, I'd appreciate it...

Thanks,

[bdl]

I know it's no help for the problem you're having at the moment, but I believe GRUB (http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/) actually supports booting W2K, you might look into installing that rather than LILO. It might be in your best interest at this point to look into GRUB, see if you can get it to boot W2K for you. Just a thought...

[The King Ant]

The Win2k CD has an option to recover from a lost MBR thingamajig. You should attempt to boot off the win2k CD and run that.

IMHO, lilo is easier to use and set up than Win2k's bootloader. After you get Win2k booting again, boot into Linux with some sort of recovery CD (the Redhat 7.1 install CD works very nicely if you're using RedHat, it might work for other distros too), then edit lilo so "boot=/dev/hda" (or sda, or whatever. The important thing is not to have a number after it). Then add a section for windows.

[Linuxcool]

This may restore your mbr. First, make sure that you have a boot disk that can boot into linux. The one you made when you installed linux is fine. Next, boot into linux and as root run the command /sbin/lilo -u. I hope this works. No guarantees.

[Stupid Newbie]

Me too. I tried to install Mandrake on my Win2k laptop and I told it not to install LILO and should use a boot disk instead. But they still install LILO. :-( Is that a bug in the installer?