On Sun, 2003-11-09 at 19:44, alemao wrote: > Hello, > > I�m new here in the newbie�s list. I have my winchester partitioned in 3 > (1 swap) and I used to have MDK9.1 and WIN98 installed, using lilo for > dualboot. > I decided to install winXP these days and something strange happened: > when I tried to restore my lilo, booting from the floppy, as I restarted the > boot was impossible. That means that no lilo was started, nor any windows. > So, I reestarted from the floppy and payed some more attention on the > programs being executed. Well, the connetion to internet (lan) was > impossible, and various other things (which I don�t know well what they are) > failed to be loaded. > Now, here are my questions on this thing: > 1) How could windows mess my MDK? Where is the intersection between > them?!?!? Ok, it�s in some place that lilo configures... but... what > happened? > 2) Why my internet connection is said to be already being used by something > else: like 127.00...x.x..x is being used, etc... in that initial screen. > 3) If I reinstaled them, in which order should I do it. > > Hope you have some clue for me! I searched the list�s archive but there was > nothing similar to it there. > > Thanks! > > Thiago
You are lucky because I have been doing some experimentation with this as of recently. XP has been written such that it can recognize Linux partitions *when it is being installed*. This came as a rather horrid surprise to me, because normally I set up all linux partitions as logicals rather than having any primaries at all. This encapsulates all the linux partitions inside an extended partition, and historically has made linux partitions invisible to winblowz versions such as 98. All this has changed with XP. M$ has changed it's strategy to acknowledge and be antagonistic to Linux. XP is now fully capable of seeing inside linux-made extended partitions to the logical partitions inside and further is evidently written to specifically go after the linux boot record in such a way that it is difficult to get it reinstalled. I installed LM92 on an experimental machine, and used linux fdisk to put the XP partition to the rear of the drive, while putting the linux extended partition to the front of the drive, giving Mandrake the prime real estate. The XP partition was originally set up as a Win95 Fat 32 type c. WinXP can convert this to NTFS on installation, which I did after I booted dos and formatted it. After booting dos, I booted the WinXP disk and installed XP. After XP was installed the sequence of events was identical to yours. The system would only boot XP initially. This was expected and came as no surprise. However what DID come as a surprise was when the rescue disk failed to restore the lilo boot record. What I did next was to boot my 7.10 dos boot floppy and run "fdisk /mbr" several times. After that I booted into the LM92 rescue mode and tried a lilo restore again. The next event was extremely interesting. The system booted into Mandrake 9.2, however the filesystem was blown. The partitions were intact (upon later examination) however something wierd had happened to the filesystems. This is a little harder to do since I seperate the partitions into /boot, /root, swap, /tmp, /var, and /user, in that order. Therefore evidently, if indeed it was XP's doing that the filesystems were blown, that meant that the OS had gone in with a knowledge of the directory structure with destruction in mind, as opposed to things occurring as a mere accident of partition access. Partition access accidents are one thing, but following paths to their destinations for the purpose of destruction is something else entirely. That has many implications. Now for the fix. In order to straighten things out I reinstalled the Powerpack cd's from scratch. Fortunately, I had saved the package installation record to floppy, so this was merely a repetitious chore. In summation, the moral of the story is to make sure you set up your partitions manually with linux fdisk (including the XP partition, as type c), format the type c with a dos bootdisk, install XP and allow it to convert the type c to NTFS (if you so desire. You can keep XP on a type c without converting if you wish. In fact it's probably better to do it this way, since under LM92 you can read/write a type c partition, but with an NTFS you cannot write to it. (BTW this also is brought to you by the demons from the nine hells, otherwise known as the M$ executives. Which they are all lorded over by Bill Gates). I always put LM9X at the beginning of the drive, where the prime real estate is, and reserve a partition at the end of the drive for winblowz. LX -- ����������������������������������������������� Linux Mandrake 9.1 Kernel 2.4.21-0.13mdk "Lets face it if winblowz wasn't full of holes then it would probably look like Linux" -- Aron Smith, Mandrake OT mailing list *Catch Star Trek Enterprise, Wednesdays on UPN* ������������������������������������������������
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