Effing win9x

[Huge]

Well I made the mistake of reinstalling win98 and it wiped out (or hid, I guess) lilo for RH. Any easy way to get it back (and no, I didn't make the emerg disk; any chance bootdisk.com would have one?

 

[gjlussier]

If I remember right, you have installed Mandrake 8? If so, the Mandrake installed created a Mandrake directory on your c: drive. This directory contains loadlin, the mandrake mini kernel, a loopback swapfile and a bat file. Run the bat file from dos and you will get into Mandrake. Once at bash prompt or wathever, type /etc/lilo, this will restore lilo.

I you have formatted your C: drive, as I suspect you did, you will find (on your Mandrake install disk1) the rawrite utility in the dosutils directory, and several linux boot floppy images in the images directory.

 

[wine4all]

I don't think Mandrake installs that stuff onto C: unless you launch it from Windoze. Mine didn't. But you should still be able to pull those files off the CD and get Linux booted. If nothing else create a boot disk using rawwritewin.exe from Windoze

 

[Neo]

Huge i thought you were running Red Hat on your lappy?

 

[Huge]

The big bossman is correct; I'm running red hat 7.1. No big hurry but I'll see if I can futz with it hopefully by the wkend.

Just got home; these 18+ hr days suck gonads ...

 

[wine4all]

OK then. LOADLIN is your answer. The syntax can be tricky and I am not near my Linux box right now to come up with it but I will post when I get home. I have an icon on my windoze desktop that runs a batch file in DOS mode using LOADLIN to boot linux.

 

[Huge]

TIA.

 

[wine4all]

OK this is the command line I have to load linux from windows in a .PIF file:

LOADLIN.EXE VMLINU~1.3-2 INITRD~1.IMG root=/dev/hda5 hdb=ide-scsi quiet

Please note the use of DOS names vs long file names and that the part which begins hdb=... is only because I have SCSI drives and you must replace root=/dev/hda5 with your appropriate boot device I.E. /dev/hda1 etc.

The first parameter after loadlin is the compressed linux kernel file and I forget what the second parameter is but you'll recognize it when you see it.

Good Luck.

The other option is to use rawwrite to create a boot diskette from a floppy.img file

 

[Huge]

Thanks; will give it a shot sometime this week. At worst case, I'll just reinstall Linux. It's not like I had anything important there, but for future use this info will be handy.