Re: Does Windows regenerate MBR by itself?
On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 06:47:48PM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote: On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 04:33:03PM -0400, Arcady Genkin wrote: I'm going over tomorrow to reinstall LILO for him. you should dd his kernel to a floppy, then use rdev to set the root device to is real root partition. then next time this happens he can just stick the floppy in and run /sbin/lilo just like normal, and everything will be everything again. How can I prevent something like this happening again? Something in the bios can be set to prevent things (viruses) from writing to the mbr. Reinstall LILO and then turn this on in the bios. Of course, it's a pain because you must rerun lilo for each kernel upgrade. You could install grub which doesn't need to be reinstalled for each kernel... I don't think doze can override the bios feature (what protection would it be otherwise). delete windows ;-) I second that. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/ -- Pat Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hobbes: Do you have an idea for your story yet? Calvin: No, I'm waiting for inspiration. You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. Hobbes: What mood is that? Calvin: Last-minute panic. -- From Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Does Windows regenerate MBR by itself?
A friend of mine is experiencing a weird situation with multy-booting. I installed Linux for him on a second harddrive all by itself, and installed Lilo into MBR on /dev/hda to mutli-boot Linux and Windows (Windows off /dev/hda1, and Linux off /dev/hdc1). This worked fine for about a month until today, when he called me and told that he no longer sees LILO's boot prompt, but the computer boots straight into Windows every time now (all of a sudden). A very similar thing happened on the same computer, when he had NT and Win98 installed (in the same partition). NT's mutlibooter worked fine untill some point, and then it just vanished, and the computer started booting straight into Win98. My friend claims he did nothing at all that could cause this. Could it be that Windows repairs the MBR by removing a foreign multy-booter and overwriting it with the native one to only boot Windows? If so, what could have caused this behavior. I've never heard of anything like this. Granted, I haven't used Windows much, and know very little about it. I'm going over tomorrow to reinstall LILO for him. How can I prevent something like this happening again? Thanks for any ideas! -- Arcady Genkin Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Re: Does Windows regenerate MBR by itself?
A very similar thing happened on the same computer, when he had NT and Win98 installed (in the same partition). NT's mutlibooter worked fine untill some point, and then it just vanished, and the computer started booting straight into Win98. My friend claims he did nothing at all that could cause this. Could it be that Windows repairs the MBR by removing a foreign multy-booter and overwriting it with the native one to only boot Windows? If so, what could have caused this behavior. I've never heard of anything like this. Granted, I haven't used Windows much, and know very little about it. Is he running a virus checker under windows? I've noticed some of them run, notice the MBR has changed when they do their full scheduled scan, and then change it back to the image of teh MBR they had when the Virus checker was installed (These days most ask...but he may have the option turned off or something)
Re: Does Windows regenerate MBR by itself?
On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 04:33:03PM -0400, Arcady Genkin wrote: I'm going over tomorrow to reinstall LILO for him. you should dd his kernel to a floppy, then use rdev to set the root device to is real root partition. then next time this happens he can just stick the floppy in and run /sbin/lilo just like normal, and everything will be everything again. How can I prevent something like this happening again? delete windows ;-) -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/ pgp07Pziz5msM.pgp Description: PGP signature
