Kent West wrote:
That's right, you don't "take it out" you need to overwrite it with another boot loader, or always boot off different media (like a floppy or CD-ROM). I believe "L" only means the first stage booted (in MBR) but was unable to find the second stage (because you had uninstalled lilo). If uninstalling lilo were to write zeros to the MBR then you wouldn't be any better off than you are leaving lilo in the MBR with the stage two program uninstalled.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
<shameless plug>Now if you were to use grub instead of lilo, you can even boot kernels and OS's that you didn't configure (or forgot to configure before rebooting). Using grub, I've been very happy with not needing to remember to run Lilo to re-write the MBR each time I install a new kernel. Oh, and I don't have to worry about /boot being below 1024 cylindars like I did with lilo when I use to use it. (That's been a while, I think Lilo might not have the old BIOS limit anymore.) The grub command line is very usefull once you get to know it.
</shameless plug>Since it's Mandrake that you've got lilo installed from, just boot into Mandrake, update it's config file (/etc/lilo.conf ?) so that it includes the entry for the debian boot partition and run lilo to write the new data to the MBR. Or install Grub and use it for your boot loader. :)
-- Jacob