> > How can I prevent this (other than by deinstalling windows! - my wife > > needs to use our laptop occasionally) > > Even wives can use GNU/Linux. At least my wife can. > hi :) My wife can but she'd rather not - she already has to cope with using a Mac at work! > Are you sure Windows did not just overwrite the MBR with Lilo in it? In this > case you just have to boot with a boot floppy and put Lilo back there. > > (I'm not subscribed to the list any more.) > thanks for the suggestion, but I managed to find the cause, see my long followup on this matter. http://lists.debian.org/debian-user-0107/msg04528.html
To summarise: The MBR was still intact but my filesystem wasnt, all my linux partitions were in an extended partition and the partition table of the extended partition got trashed because the windows installation thought that it's partition was bigger than it should have been. So the MBR and LILO were still able to find my installed kernel (which must obviously have been on part of the disk that wasnt overweritten) but the extended partition table was junk and the root filesystem couldnt be found.... A big Debian reinstall was the solution...
