had to reinstall windows and lost lilo

fatenabu · 12-22-2005, 12:51 AM

Hello,
I have ran into a problem. I had Mandriva 2006, and Xandros 3 DE and Windows on my PC. I used lilo through my Mandriva as my boot loader. Unfortunaly windows screwed up really bad and I had to reinstall windows. When doing so I lost my lilo boot loader and I was wondering if their was a way to fix this or to use a windows boot loader. I also have the problem that A friend of mine has my Mandriva cd and is using it to install it on his machine and he took it with him over christmas break. Is their a way for me to restore lilo or use an alternative to boot to all three operating systems without needing my mandrivia 2006 install DVD.

Thanks,

Dustin

megaspaz · 12-22-2005, 01:36 AM

You should be able to use your install cd and go into recovery mode or simple shell. In here, I think you can just type lilo and have it install correctly.

Or if you made a bootdisk/bootcd, you can boot with that and then open up a shell and type lilo as root.

beagle2 · 12-22-2005, 01:44 AM

Unless you have done some fancy footwork reinstalling windows you may find windows has erased all traces of your other distros - it tends to use whole drive for its own use.

fatenabu · 12-22-2005, 02:52 AM

i only installed windows to my ntfs partition. The other partitions are fine and are there I just can't get to them. I do not have the install cd right now. That is my problem

As I said earlier my friend has it to put linux on his system. I won't get it back until after christmas break.

Thanks,

Dustin

bit128_linux · 12-22-2005, 03:06 AM

Go grab a small iso like sysresccd.org. It is a very good one. Not so big. Burn it, boot it. There you go. It shouldn't be so hard. If you like more cryptic CDs then try one of toms.net/rb/.. You should keep in mind that these are somehow hard to understand at first. Good luck!

drakethegreat · 12-23-2005, 01:17 PM

Honestly this is something I always run into myself. I think distros need to wise up and create a simple way for the newbies to install the boot loader whenever its needed and on any drive they need it on. This would be a good improvement cause I doubt microsoft intends to stop overwriting the MBR.

Darin · 12-23-2005, 01:32 PM

http://www.slax.org is another small sized bootable Linux. Either way, once in your LiveCD, mount your HDD Linux partition and chroot into it to run /sbin/lilo.

Code:

mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hd
chroot /mnt/hd
/sbin/lilo
init 6

Armon · 12-23-2005, 03:49 PM

I have the exact same problem, except I am using grub. What would be the procedure for me to get grub back w/ windows and ubuntu

megaspaz · 12-23-2005, 03:54 PM

grub-install /dev/hda

do not put a device label number in the device label above:

so NO - /dev/hda1, or /dev/hda2, blah blah blah.

Armon · 12-26-2005, 01:45 PM

thanks I'll try it out when i get a chance

dianat100 · 01-03-2006, 01:50 PM

I had to remove one of the hard disk drives from my PC which (apparently) had grub written on it. It was a second HDD (hdb). Now I am unable to boot to Linux or worse yet, reinstall boot loader. Upon insterting a Linux install CD (be it Mandriva, Suse, Ubuntu or Linspire) and going into recovery mode it informs me of errors, i.e. no HDD found or not able to reinstall lilo or grub (Mandriva).
I'd like to avoid reinstalling linux just to get back the boot option.

Can anyone offer a workaround? Thank you.