Hi,
My name is Avdi, and I'm an idiot.
Specifically, I installed Win98 on a partition I'd cleared for it on my
Mandrake 7.2 system, *without* checking to make sure my emergency linux boot
disk actually worked. Naturally, Win98 overwrote my MBR, and now I'm unable to
boot linux. I can boot the Mandrake install CD, but I can't find a way to
easily reinstall LILO or GRUB from it. Originally, I had a trouble with the
lilo on the CD giving my "Unsupported device" errors; after I rebooted and
tried again for some reason the RAM disk was read-only, where it had been
writeable the first time I booted from the CD. Too wierd... anyway, I'm able to
mount my linux partition from the CD boot, but what do I do from there? I can't
install LILO from the old partiion because LILO expects various files
(like /boot/boot.b) to be in specific places in the filesystem; and the ramdisk
is read-only. I can't reinstall GRUB, mainly because I can't figure out it's
internal documentation and I can't find any external docs.
All I want is to get a super-basic LILO or GRUB setup installed into my MBR,
enough so I can boot linux from /dev/hda1 (which is a reiserfs partition, BTW)
and reinstall my old GRUB setup using mandrake tools. What's the simplest,
easiest way to do this? Thanks,
-Avdi
