Re: Help: Screwed up LILO MBR

[Heather <star@betelgeuse.starshine.org>]

> Hi everyone,
> 
> sorry if this is a bit of a saga but please bear with me.

[trevails of repartitioning, ellided]

> A boot off RH floppy and re-install of LILO gives me the ability to boot
> into RH6.2.
> I can boot off floppy into potato on /dev/hda2.
> I can no longer boot Windoze, no great loss I know but I am not yet
> ready to give it up entirely.
> 
> Fdisk shows hda1, hda5 and hda2 as bootable and the table verifies. I do
> have the horrible feeling I may have run DOS Fdisk at some point.
 
This may have been so, but my guess is that you have a LILO now, or it
wouldn't be RedHat that you are still able to get into.  It'd be DOS
(/dev/hda1, the first "active" partition) or nothing (if it hated that you
have more than one partition flagged as bootable).

> Can anybody suggest a way to get back Win98 on /dev/hda1 and, more to
> the point, suggest a way to be able to boot /dev/ha1, /dev/hda5 and
> /dev/hda2?
 
Yes.  On the flavor of Linux that you can get into, I'd recommend that you
edit the /etc/lilo.conf so it contains three stanzas for boot instead of one.
Use a real text editor, not some redhat tool that might offer you only one
stanza (or it may offer more, but if you wouldn't recognize it, then it's
not helpful to you).

Looks like this would work to get you both linux flavors.  Works best if
the /boot for both sides either looks the same, or is actually the same 
small fs mounted by both... then, you can copy the lilo.conf into both
linux sides and use it freely.

boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda5
install=/boot/boot.b
map=/boot/map
vga=4
prompt
timeout=35
default=linux
image=/boot/vmlinuz
        label=linux
        read-only
image=/boot/vmlinuz
        label=potato
        root=/dev/hda2
        read-only
other = /dev/hda1
	label = msdos
	table = /dev/hda

Basically this means, default root partition is /dev/hda5, but for the
other two stanzas, we override that.  This used info from the excellent
documentation in LILO's manual (under debian, 
	zless /usr/doc/lilo/Manual.txt.gz)

> Yours in hope,
>               Tim

Best of Luck,  Heather * star@ many places...