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LILO/MBR Mysteries [solved]


Guest nildot
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Guest nildot

So I've had all the usual problems that newbies like me can have when installing their first Linux distro alongside a windows OS.

 

I have Windows XP running from a serial ata drive.

I installed Mandrake Linux 10.1 on a regular, seperate harddrive.

 

Windows was installed first and the SATA is the primary. Then came Linux. Sure enough I used LILO as a bootmanager and woop, after the installation my NTLDR was missing and if replaced after having done a fixmbr on the windows rescue prompt, I got the message that the OS was missing entirely.

 

So I went ahead and thought ... maybe LILO got my partition names confused. I simply copied the ntldr from the windows boot cd onto all my partitions.

 

Didn't help. No longer did I receive the message of a missing OS. But now the ntldr was missing again.

 

Not quite knowing what I was doing at this point, I simply went ahead and did a fresh install of Linux. This time I let it auto allocate the partitions. It created two ext3 partitions and a swap.

 

And behold ... for some reason my windows and linux boot just fine from LILO. No errors. All good.

 

My questions is: Why?

What did I do that made it work?

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listen: better be like manual persons and have things that work, even if you don't know why than be an intellectual that have things that don't work but who know why.

 

[though, me, I combine both: that doesn't work and I don't know why :cheesy: ]

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It's a mystery to me why you had problems one time and not the other.

But sometimes, Mandrake will try to put lilo on /dev/hda, which is the IDE drive, because it sees the SATA as /dev/sda and wants it to be slave. I had a difficult time getting it to install lilo on my SATA and not my IDE....eventually had to unplug the IDE drive and install and then plug the IDE back in and add it manually to fstab and lilo. Glad you didn't have to go through that.

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Guest nildot

I just hope a similar routine like the one I attempted today, will work again. I'd prefer though if I knew what exactly happened.

 

Eventually I'll get the hang of it. I just thought that somebody, here, might know and might have made a similar experience previous to me.

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My guess is as Steve hinted: Mandrake misses a little with sata drives. It tends to look for ide drives and not utilize sata drives.

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Guest nildot

I'll look into that. Thanks for the hints.

 

At least it recognizes SATA drives without having to install drivers first before installation can even start. :screwy:

 

:thanks:

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