LILO crash

[Brian Conway]

> Well, LILO did it again. Every time I boot I get <LI> and a cursor, and
> that's it: no Win and no Linux. All utilities for reviving my MBR I've
> found on the Net seem to involve loosing all my data ... Can anyone
> suggest some way of getting out of this fix ? Are there any good
> free utils, considering that I still want Windows to be my primary
> system for now ? Thanks,

Check if you hard disk is set for LBA mode or normal mode.  Lilo often
doesn't like being on a disk set for the wrong one.  All the
documentation I've read claims that lilo wants to load on a disk set in
normal mode, whereas quite often I've also found it to be the case where
such a mode would freeze at LI and it instead wanted LBA mode.  I'm not
sure how it's supposed to work, but try switching from one to the
other.  As for your boot record, if you want to kill lilo entirely, fire
up a dos bootdisk and run 'fdisk /mbr'.  This will overwrite you boot
record and you'll boot directly into windows without touching anything
else.  No data should be lost (except lilo in your mbr).

Brian Conway
dogbert at clue4all.net

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
                -- Henry Spencer
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