I have had the exact same situation. I have two hard disks, with Windows
on hda, and Linux on hdc. Normally, I install LILO to the MBR of
hda. After installing Mandrake 7.1, I could boot into Linux through GRUB,
but Windows was inaccessible. I could boot DOS with a floppy disk, but the
C: drive was no longer readable from DOS. Using System Commander, I was
able to restore the Windows boot record, but System Commander can't do
anything with GRUB (it recognizes LILO just fine). Quite a mess. I can
boot Windows normally again, but have to use a boot floppy for Linux. I
tried resetting GRUB, and also using LILO, but it just trashes the boot
record, and I have to restore with System Commander once again. Whatever
GRUB does is apparently not so easy to undo, and there is no way I can find
to uninstall it. I have *never* had these problems with any other
distribution, including Mandrake 7.0 Seems rather irresponsible of
Mandrake to use alpha software for its default boot loader, but that's what
they did. Sure doesn't seem ready for prime time to me.
Torrey
At 06:48 PM 7/22/00 -0400, Harry Flaxman wrote:
>Well, here's another problem I ran into upgrading to 7.1. I tried
>specifying LILO when DrakConf asked me which bootloader to use. The
>lilo configuration returned a syntax error. I went ahead and chose
>GRUB. when I booted to my first hard drive....LILO stopped after the I,
>so I used my handy dandy dos boot disk to do a fdisk /mbr. C: drive
>returned an error, and I couldn't get a directory listing on it. Upon
>rebooting...I got GRUB, and tried to choose windows to boot from, and I
>get a loop...no winslows boot. GRUB booted me into linux, and upon
>examining HDA1 there, all of the winslows data files are accessible. I
>just can't get fdisk to do anything to the drive now, and can't boot
>into winslows. There are a couple of utilities there that I use from
>time to time.
>
>Has anyone run into a similar situation?
