Partition Woes

[Demosthenes]

Okay, after going through a partitioning fiasco, I have run into another problem.

Everything installed nicely, as it always does. The current state is Mandrake8.1 and Win98FE. I was switching between partitions to make sure everything was operational. Then, I started tweaking linux and setting up everything, mainly trying to get it to work with my soundcard. When I next booted to the primary DOS partition containing my Windows, I was faced with the standard black DOS screen with the cryptic message: "LIL-". Went back into Linux, tooled around with the boot manager, obviously LILO, and then tried again. Now, I got an even more cryptic scrolling message going to the tune of "01 01 01 01 01 . . ." ad infinitum. And it will keep scrolling 01 for minutes.

The partition itself is intact as far as I can tell. I can floppy boot to DOS and get listings and read files, but, linux does not recognize it anymore. DOS says the listed beginning of the partition and the actual start of the partition are different, but it also says this could because I am booting from a floppy. Should I uninstall the boot loader, let it boot straight from the primary partition, and see what happens? My next step is to run "fdisk /mbr" and rewrite the master boot record. Hopefully, it will solve the discrepancy without messing with my data.

Respectfully,

Demosthenes

[juanito]

I have had the same problem. Just run a multi system Boot Manager. I use "Mr. Booter", a shareware program I got off a disk of utilities called Maestro, but assume it is available for download. I have to do this everytime I do a re-install or upgrade to either Win Doze or Linux

Juan

[Demosthenes]

The bootloader was not to blame this time.

Whatever it is I did, it seriously messed up the Master Boot Record; in particular, the partition tables. I do not know how I went on without knowing this, but if LILO fails and only types out LIL- this apparently means there is a harddrive geometry problem or perhaps even a harddisk failure. So, I resolved the problem, and now it works fine.

Thanks for the reply though.

Respectfully,

Demosthenes