Bootloaders will not install to MBR [solved]

[kenbo]

Here's the situatiuon.

I had XP sp2 and mandriva 10.1 Installed Dual boot on my comp. NO problems.

 

I decided to try out Vista beta2 and since I need XP for school I decided to take off mandy and install Vista there. All went well. I found no good reason to keep Vista (just a fancier and more annoying XP) So I got rid of that and used XP's recovery console to fixmbr and fixboot.

 

Now I'm installing Mandriva 2006 powerpack From DVD. It installs fine no errors at all. I used Lilo graphical. (no errors reported when it installed) when the install was done I rebooted and the computer went directly to XP, no LILO at all.

So I used the rescue mode on the DVD to re-install lilo. That gave me errors so I mounted and chroot /mnt and ran LILO manually. The only error (warning) I got was about /proc/partitions not existing. (because I haven't actually booted into my install yet) rebooted, and still no lilo.

I tried doing a dummy upgrade with no better succes.

so I did it again only this time using GRUB. Still the same thing. The computer just boots XP NO lilo or Grub.

 

I know Mandriva installed. I have Ext2IFS installed and can see the Linux drive. It looks like everything is there.

I set the bootloaders to install to /dev/hda and they give me no errors. So it appears they installed but they don't.

 

This is too weird. I've searched but I can't seem to find any problem like this on the web.

 

Anybody here have any ideas?

 

I have 3 HD's a 20G with XP, a 10G with Mandriva and a 60G (fat32) for Data.

 

here's the lilo.conf I was using

 

default="linux"
boot=/dev/hda
map=/boot/map
keytable=/boot/us.klt
menu-scheme=wb:bw:wb:bw
prompt
nowarn
timeout=100
message=/boot/message
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux"
root=/dev/hdf5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append=" resume=/dev/hdf1 splash=silent"
vga=788
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="linux-nonfb"
root=/dev/hdf5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append=" resume=/dev/hdf1"
image=/boot/vmlinuz
label="failsafe"
root=/dev/hdf5
initrd=/boot/initrd.img
append=" failsafe resume=/dev/hdf1"
other=/dev/hda1
label="windows"
table=/dev/hda
other=/dev/hde1
label="windows1"
table=/dev/hde
map-drive=0x80
   to=0x81
map-drive=0x81
   to=0x80

[arctic]

other=/dev/hda1

label="windows"

table=/dev/hda

other=/dev/hde1

label="windows1"

table=/dev/hde

map-drive=0x80

to=0x81

map-drive=0x81

to=0x80

What's that, pussycat? It seems as if your system is confused because you had both, XP and Vista on your box. And why is ther the map-drive entry? It seems as if both drives need to be properly set up again. I think Vista owned the mbr sector and had it's boot.ini pointing at windows xp and that causes not a lot of trouble.

 

You could try to unplug the XP drive, set the Linux drive as master and reinstall the bootloader (choose grub, it is more secure in overwriting the mbr). If that works, add the XP drive as slave and map the drives in the grub configuration file. Maybe that bypasses the problem.

[kenbo]

hde is the 60G data drive. Mandrake has always doen that when I install it. Don't know why. Vista was on the drive I installed Linux to. It's boot.ini should have been taken care of when I did the fixboot in XP. But you never know! :) I'll try out your suggestion in the morning and see what happens.

[pmpatrick]

The vista bootloader might still be on hde. That's what lilo and grub seem to be picking up as they are both trying to load a windows installation on hde1. I'm suggesting that vista installed it's own bootloader on hde and changed the winxp bootloader to chainload the vista bootlader there. When you ran the winxp fixmbr, it changed its own bootloader on hda but left the vista bootloader on hde intact. Just to test this theory, go into your bios setup and set hde as your first boot hard drive. If you get the vista bootloader screen, then for sure it's still there.

If that's the case, you can get rid of the vista bootloader by overwritng it. Post back if the above proves correct and I'll go into more detail.

[kenbo]

I went into bios and changed the boot order. When I booted up I got LILO! now that I'm in Mandriva I see it has my drives reversed (hda is my data drive mentioned above and hde is my windows drive) For now, since it works I'm going to leave everything the way it is. (actually I haven't tried booting to windows through LILO yet, so I hope that works!)

 

Thanks for the tip, It got me going in the right direction!

 

Ken

[AussieJohn]

It seems as if it may eventually come to pass that the only way to wipe out Vista leftovers will be to deep format the complete hard drive. :D :D :D

 

Now that I have a scungy second box for Windows, there will NEVER be a Windows on my current MAIN box. Maybe another Linux but never ever another Windows.

 

I always kept a Windows98 floppy boot disc to clear the MBR whenever I had dual boot problems (most were Lilo derived hence my change to using Grub) and I found this to be the quickest and easiest of all.

 

Cheers. John.