Giving boot-loaders the boot

Boot up blues...

[NetGrease]

I have successfully removed Mandrake 8.1 from a computer that needs "that other operating system" installed on it, but I can't seem to get rid of the boot loader.

I've removed all partitions from the drive, but lilo still attempts to run (and fails). Can anyone help?

[netcommr]

Are you using FDISK to change the partition settings??

If so, you may need to use a utility which runs on the same OS as Mandrake. This is due to the incapability of FDISK to read non-dos partitions.

I do not know for sure if this is the problem, since I have no experience with Mandrake, but I have run into this same thing changing drives from an NTFS (Win NT) partition to a dos OS, FDISK (dos version) can not remove NTFS partitions. So, this may be a good thing to think about, try a different utility to remove the old partitions. (look for 'extended' non-dos partitions)

[windsor]

This comes up with any UNIX-like operating system.

Get to a DOS prompt somehow and type "fdisk /mbr".

That'll clear out the Master Boot Record so that McOperatingSystems are happy.

Rob++

[NetGrease]

Thanks for the advice, it's very much appreciated.

I was indeed using a DOS version of FDisk, which it appears was not altering the MBR properly - Lilo was partly loading and then freezing the machine. Everything appears to be back to normal now.

For future reference, could either of you recommend a decent partition/format manager? I've got the Partition Magic 6.0 boot disk program - would this be sufficient in future, should I get the chance to revert back to Linux?

[windsor]

I've always just used the "pfdisk" that you can find at freebsd.org or netbsd.org

Rob++