Sidney Brooks wrote:
> 2) I have Windows XP, Mandrake, Redhat, and Debian partitions. > Everything but Debian works. The boot loader is Mandrake lilo. > HOWEVER, I CANNOT TAKE LILO OUT. In what may or may not be a > related problem, if I uninstall lilo, when I reboot, at CDROM > (order is floppy, CDROM, Hard Drive) I get L followed by an endless > string of 99 unless there is a disk in the drive. Even here, I have > a peculiarity, I can boot any bootable disk except my Windows XP > disk, which starts with the message that it is checking hardware > and then freezes. I am begining to think that Mandrake lilo may > have somehow corrupted my BIOS. However, nothing that I do with the > BIOS setup cures the problems.
I used "startx" and could not go into the graphics mode. Here are the significant entries from /var/log/XFree86.0.log (WW) about cyrillic fonts - not significant (WW) Cannot open APM (WW) SAVAGE: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PC:1:0:0) found (EE) No devices detected
I would suggest running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" and selecting VESA or VGA as your device type, just to see if you can get X to start at all.
In order to deal with the uneraseable MBR, I shall attempt to follow the advice of a technician of the company which made my computer. It involves wiping the hard drive clean. If it works and I still have a computer, I shall then avoid the Mandrake version of linux.
Umm, I'm not sure why you'd want to do that. Your MBR is not "unerasable"; it simply has something other than what you expect to have in it. What do you want in your MBR?
As mentioned in a previous message, you _must_ have some sort of boot loader in order to boot off the hard drive. Whether it's Mandrake's or someone else's is insignificant, as long as it works. Perhaps I haven't understood what's the problem.
If you're still getting the 99s, boot off a rescue CD/floppy into Mandrake or Debian, edit /etc/lilo.conf (in Debian. Mandrake - ?) properly for each OS you have installed and want to be able to boot, and then run "lilo" to reinstall lilo. Boom, you're done.
Now if you want to get rid of Mandrake for some reason, and want to go through the hassle of wiping the drive and reinstalling everything, that's fine. But there's no need to. Wiping the drive and starting over is a habit that became necessary in the Windows world. In the GNU world, that's seldom needed.
-- Kent