[plug] Newbie after advice.

[Darrell Horrocks]

Welcome also Gavin.

Just a bit more of a hint that I found really useful when you do stuff 
the MBR (if you stuff the MBR).  You can restore the MBR with purely the 
windows MBR, by using the windows boot disk (or CD), letting windows 
boot to a command line and then entering FDISK /MBR  A reboot will then 
boot windows.

This FDISK command has worked for me on several occasions, on Windows 98 
and Win98SE.  Steve's warning should be taken for other versions of windows.

While this doesn't make Linux useable without a Linux boot disk, at 
least you can then get back to then net to get more information on how 
to fix the boot problem.

Just to echo Steve.

1) Backup windows
2) Make a linux bootdisk.

Regards all.

Darrell

Steve Grasso wrote:

> Hi Gavin,
> 
> Welcome!
> 
> On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Gavin wrote:
> 
>> I intend to install a new hard drive to run red hat using my current
>> drive as primary and installing LILO on that keeping windows ( 95
>> version 4).  
>> Will this set up work?
> 
<SNIP>

> 
> 6.  If your MBR becomes screwed, and nothing will boot on powerup, BLERK! -- a
> copy of the original MBR and partition table is stored in /boot on your Linux
> disk, and can be restored to hda by booting from your newly-created Linux
> boot/rescue disk(s), then typing: 
> 
> cat /boot/boot.0300 > /dev/hda
> 
> BTW, to retore JUST the MBR, type:
> 
> dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1 
> 
> OK, this probably won't be necessary, but here it is, just in case.
> (Also, as a side-note, restoring the MBR using undocumented DOS fdisk 
> parameters sometimes -- mostly in my experience --does not work)


-- 
===================================
Darrell Horrocks