Page 2 - Teething problems - Red Hat 7.2

thanks for the link, neon_tom.. I have downloaded the bootables, but then got dragged off by the missus, so back to it tonight!

Then hopefully I will be able to do a fdisk/mbr from dos as Mr Hirsch suggests

On Saturday I went out to Tottenham Court road and bought a cheap serial modem at one of the computer fairs - at least I now have a working Linux system, so I'm able to check my emails and ftp some code down off the sites.. I'll post back when I have got this boot disk working and (hopefully) rewritten my mbr. The next job will be to try AGAIn with lilo, without stuffing it up!!!

I just love (hate) this stuff!

Christo

Let's hope that none of this applies: http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtfdiskmbr.htm

I guess that seeing as I haven't suffered a virus attack and there's no security software to worry about, things should be okay

... i read this article and i think it is crap. as long as you are no power-user (or in a company) that would use tools like he describes (they are fictive, i know a lot of tools like the ones described, no single one has this problems).
a lot of uninteresting / unneccessary infos (eg. about the wasted space in the boot sector).


the only paragraph i agree with is the one about a virus knowing that it was killed. same is done by many virii when you clean an executable file from the virus code...

if you have a virus and reboot into the system after only doing fdisk/mbr ... nothing to add... same if you try to start an antivirus-software while the virus is still running.

finally:
you will do the same harm to the system by installing windows onto another partition / harddisk. so windows as such is just as dangerous.

and yes, i do know what i am doing. if after "fdisk /mbr" your harddisk is gone completely, i AM still able to recover the system.

...

when you try again, get the newest version of lilo from the redhat homepage and set the option "linear" in /etc/lilo.conf. this makes it store sectors not in CHS mode (which differs from hd to hd and if your bios is not setup correctly) but in absolute sectors. (C*H*S)

greetings,
Manuel

apologies for the silence, I'm sure you're all itching to know how I got on...

well thanks to the freeDOS project, http://www.fdos.org/bootdisks (I think).

I managed to download a boot image which booted me into freeDOS. From there, it was just fdisk/mbr, remove the disk, restart - and bingo!

I couldn't have done it without the help of you guys, (especially M.Hirsch - thank you). In particular, writing to a FAT floppy in Linux without affecting the files dd did the trick. I breathe a sigh of relief.

later,
Christo

When booting lilo from a logical partition or past 1024 cyc. use the -L option. you may also try -P for a mismatch parition table. hope this helps.
chrisj