Need help removing lilo

[exar]

Please see my problems that I thought were hardware related at the following:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=348428#post348428

Turns out I think I need to get rid of lilo and I'll be fine, but tell me what you think.

Thanks for your help.

P.S. I'm a Linux newbie, and probably shouldn't have tried it in the first place since I know just enough to get me in trouble... :D

[whig]

I use SBM (smart boot manager) and love it. You can install it from a dos floppy. It allows you to boot any OS on any partition on your disk (with a boot sector, of course). Note that M$ systems are so crippled the c: drive must be a primary partition.

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

[Kamel]

yep, that's definitely a lilo error message. this is why i personally use grub. what i would do is boot from a livecd distribution or what-not (ie: gentoo live cd, or knoppix), and install grub with it. from there, use grub as your boot loader and you should be fine. in order to write grub to your MBR, you will need to type grub into the console, then do setup (hd0,0) in order to write the mbr to /dev/hda. i really don't know how with lilo.

good luck, i strongly suggest using grub, because i've had my linux partition do exactly what you described here multiple times using lilo, but never messed up with grub.

[blueworm]

To get rid of lilo or grub so that your normal windows boots.
type.
fdisk /mbr

[Kamel]

note that that command does come with some risk of failure, so i would certainly suggest a bit of research if that bothers you.

[exar]

I tried fixboot, fixmbr, fdisk /mbr, the WinXP recovery console, BootMagic, and the Linux recovery w/ Mandrake. Nothing would repair the error, so I went the easy way...I bought a new HD. I needed a new one anyway, so this was a good excuse. :D

Now I just hope that putting my old C: on as F: will allow me to copy my important files and then I'll just format and have a nice size secondary hd.

So thanks to everyone for the help.

[Kamel]

heh, glad you got it worked out. with that behind you, i suggest using grub in the future :). i've lost a couple of linux distros to lilo, and will never trust it again, heh.