I hadn't thought of doing it that way Jason, thanks. I was using lilo -b /dev/hde -s /boot/winxp-bootloader. To back it up and when xp wouldn't boot from lilo, I tried lilo -U /dev/hde -s /boot/winxp-bootloader. I thought I was putting the xp bootloader back, but what happened was that the computer just kept rebooting when it tried to read the boot record. Not sure what the problem was. I guess "dd" would have been safer. Anyway, xp's bootloader is gone and we don't have an xp bootdisk as we used a win98 bootdisk to load xp. I just talked to him and he doesn't want xp he's putting win98 back on.
Here's an interesting thing though, he loaded xp on fat 32 instead of NTFS and the win98 boot disk would just hang when we tried to boot to it to try to fdisk /mbr. I was clueless. He came up with the bright idea after I left last night to use linux fdisk to change the partition id of xp from "fat 32 (LBA)" to I think he said just fat 32 or fat 16. Then the win98 bootdisk loaded fine. This doesn't make any sense to me. Microsoft has some weird coding practices I guess. To answer your question Shannon, he has two cdroms (one's a burner) and an ATA 100 40 GB disk drive. It is only recognized by 2.4 kernels. /dev/hda is his regular cdrom, /dev/hdc is his burner, and /dev/hde is the harddrive. The partitions are setup as: hde1 = xp hde2 = extended hde5 = linux root hde6 = swap hde7 = usr hde8 = home I don't think it possible to set lilo in the extended partition and set /dev/hde5 as bootable. Can BIOS handle that if it's in an extended partition? Thanks for your responses though, I will try Jason's method next time I try to do a dual boot with xp. Boyd _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp. ================================================ BRLUG - The Baton Rouge Linux User Group Visit http://www.brlug.net for more information. Send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to change your subscription information. ================================================
