Gregory Seidman wrote:
By installing Sarge I have somehow rendered my friend's Windows system
unbootable. The original configuration was two 200GB drives, hda and hdb.
Windows XP was on hda and the other drive was apparently empty.
I repartitioned hdb as part of the Sarge install, removing the unused NTFS
partition and replacing it with root (ext3), swap, home (ext3), and vfat
partitions. I had the installer use LILO, and when it rebooted into
base-config everything appeared to be fine.
I then altered the /etc/lilo.conf to make sure that it was installing on
/dev/hda but using /dev/hdb1 as root. It seemed happy with this and
installed on the MBR of /dev/hda without difficulty. After installing and
configuring lots of packages, I decided to reboot to Windows and leave it
at that for the time being. Windows would boot part of the way, then
complain about a missing AUTOCHK or something and immediately reboot. So I
tried booting to Linux, and it couldn't find the root partition. I managed
to boot by explicitly giving root=/dev/hdb1 on the LILO prompt, but there
does not seem to be any way to get Windows to boot.
Has anyone run into anything like this? Does anyone know how to fix it? At
this point I'd be happy enough not to be able to boot to Linux at all, just
get things back to where booting the computer brings up Windows. Please
help.
--Greg
Here's what I would try. Ensure you have a linux rescue CD (Knoppix) to
hand, or make a lilo boot floppy, google for this if you don't know how
as I did this on install and not sure how to do it once installed.
Boot with the XP install cd and use the rescue mode to get a prompt.
There are then two possibilites
fixboot - should be the one you need as this ensures the boot
information in the XP partition is correct.
fixmbr - which will replace the MBR of /dev/hda and remove lilo (hence
the need for rescue/boot floppy)
Hopefully the first will work, but if you do need to run both then use
the rescue cd/floppy to boot linux and rerun LILO.
Personally I had trouble with LILO and switched to grub when I installed
my current PC and find it much easier to manage as you only need to edit
/boot/grub/menu.lst to make changes. No destructive writes to MBR each
time. YMMV
HTH
Wackojacko
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