New ISOs for reinstall

[rockybalboa]

Hey all,

Please don't flame me for this. I was in a heavy MDK learning mode after installing 10.1. I ran into problems (school, new job, bad motherboard) and gave up using (learning) my MDK install. Sorry, but I have 15 years Winblows experience and less than one on MDK and I was in emergency mode.

 

This was a dual boot install with WinXP, that was working great at one time. Anyway, I want my MDK back. Problem is I lost the partition tables or whatever so it looks like a reinstall would be easiest. Of course I'm thinking in Micro$oft mode and have been told that you should never have to reinstall Linux.

 

So if I do a reinstall, should I use the 10.1 ISOs that I downloaded right after 10.1 went to full public release? Or have they changed enough that I would benefit from fresh ones? Data transfer is not a problem since I have a high speed connection.

 

Is there one last hope of reloading and saving my former configuration? As I said I was off it for 3+ months and after installing my new mobo, I screwed up the drive partitions on one (the Linux one) of my drives. So I have no way of telling what got damaged/lost, etc.

 

Thanks to anyone that can advise me,

Dan

[Ixthusdan]

First, take the Mandrake cd1, boot with it and see what partitions, if any, it finds. It is quite possible that windows has destroyed the partition table. If this is the case, repairing it would blow windows. Yes, it is designed that way. B)

 

Try to do a fresh lilo install through rescue mode. If lilo can't find a kernel, then you will have to do a full reinstall. If some of the partition is readable, you might be able to save your configuration files. But then if there is no kernel, then your configuration files are also gone.

 

I would get the latest 10.1 release, which is the official release, not the community.