help help help

[ressler76]

I have a Compaq laptop 266mhz 96 meg of ram I did some updating
ran scan disk I have mandrake 7.1 with win 98 and decided not to boot one day my freind stuck a win 2000 recovery disk in and now just sticks at the stage one of loadlin will not take a boot disk
now states missing ntldr added that to the boot disk and I get invalid boot ini while try ing to boot to c:\winnt\ how can I get back to dos to fdisk/mbr to get rid of all these problems.

[GaryRouth]

Well, can you tell I've been stalling, hoping some one else would tackle this one? . . .

The Win2k bootloader (ntldr) has most likely overwritten your Linux bootloader (loadlin). Seems like you'll have to go into the Bios of your Compaq, set it to boot from a floppy, and use your Win98 boot disk to boot to "start computer without cd support" (in other words, DOS). Then from DOS, try the fdisk/mbr and see if you're OK or not.

Whether you're OK or not will depend on what exactly that Win2k recovery disk did. I think most techs will agree that it's definitely not a wonderful idea to use a recovery disk for a different operating system than the ones you already have installed.

I don't have experience with Win2k recovery disks (I have almost every other OS except 2k...but will be installing a copy later this month) .... Are you referring to just a boot disk, a drive image disk, or an option from the OS cd? You wouldn't want it to have started to install 2k on an older laptop like that (might not even fit on the hard drive) . . .

Hope you can boot to the floppy & try the fdisk trick. If that works, I'd imagine you'll need to redo the Linux loader before Linux will go.
...Gary

[ressler76]

thanks went back to basic, old boot disk worked fdisk mbr and reloaded loadlin/grub thanks for all the help