I'm not getting LILO prompt on boot up

Hello Friends

I had dual boot with Red Hat Linux 7.1 and Windows 95 in my machine. Due to some unavoidable reasons, i formatted the Windows 95 and re-installed it.

After re-installing, i'm not getting the LILO prompt. I'm getting directly to the Windows.

Can anyone know how to rectify this problem, so that i can get the LILO prompt again.

Thanks in Advance
Raghuram B.

when your "/boot" is on the partition /dev/hda2, you should activate this partition

probaply you took the default preferences in the linux-Install --> wrote it in the MBR --> win overwrote it

you have to rescue Linux (disc or CD) and write the bootup on /dev/hda2 if your /boot is on hda2

This is in the manual, Redhat says any other OS that gets installed over Linux will have default MBR status


I would reinstall Linux over Windows then Linux will have priority


Mark

That is completely unecessary. You should have a boot floppy disk which you can use to boot up Linux. If you do, use that and see if you can find your lilo configuration file (lilo.conf, it should be in /etc). Then run this command: "/usr/sbin/lilo /etc/lilo.conf" and it will reinstate LILO on your MBR.

You may find when you use the boot disk you can't find the partition with your files on (sometimes boot disks just boot up their own mini-Linux OS) then mount the partition to a folder (so mkdir a folder called "stuff" or whatever you like, then do "mount /dev/hdax /stuff" where hdax is the partition with /etc on). Then go into /stuff and you should find your files in there.

Sometimes installation CDs have an option called "boot into installed system" or something along those lines, which will let you boot into your installed RH Linux system. That's really ideal because once in you can just type "lilo" and it'll reinstate your MBR.

Honestly, reinstalling Linux should be a last resort... that's the problem with RH.. it doesn't encourage you to learn a thing about the way Linux works!

You are right about it being unnecessary to reinstall Linux if you have the LILO disk but when i installed Linux on my Windows system as a workstation it didn't give me the option to make a LILO disk it just wrote the bootstrap to the beginning of the MBR so what your saying won't apply to some Linux installations


BTW im refering to a KDE workstation install with Redhat 6.1 (cartman)


Mark

You can still use the CD, or make your own bootdisk from any machine (be it Windows or Linux)...