MANDRIVA dual boot problems with MaxstorPlus 80 & DDO

[CharlieS]

Hi;
I bought your mag so my son & I could escape Win2k on the home machine.

I had formatted the 80G disk with about 6 partitions when it was installed earlier this year anticipating a Linux install at some time..using Maxstor DDO so that Win2k with the "old" (June 2000) BIOS could see all the disk.

Not sure if the install process went correctly.

Linux boots OK; son is delighted with the games.

I found out how to edit the lilo.config file so you had time to see the prompts; and added a section so that Windows was an option. Ran /sbin/lilo after reading some of the HOWTOs

When I select the "windows" option, I get the DDO blue start-up banner, but he complains that he can't find any disks that need drivers; so DDO is not started...then PC hangs waiting for a floppy....

TIA,
Charlie.

[Guest]

At a guess, it is probably because you chose to install lilo in the boot sector.
Easiest way to try and fix it: make a boot up floppy for Mandriva (you can do this from the Mandriva drakconf, if it is the same as it used to be with Mandrake).
Test the boot floppy to make sure you can still access Mandriva.
Then start up from a dos floppy, and do fdisk /mbr (this will restore the boot sector).
Win2k should boot ok.
Then boot from the mandriva boot floppy, and reinstall lilo, but NOT in the boot sector.

Hope that helps, others here may have a better way, however.

[dandnsmith]

Not sure that fdisk /mbr from a DOS floppy is advisable -
I think the boot code may need to be different for NT based products, and that you need the recovery CD from which to do fixmbr (that's the way it goes for XP)

[Guest]

Hi Derek & guest;
I have been trying a couple of other things in the meantime; here's the "blog" that has got me to the "nothing works now" phase.

- read the available Mandrake docs, did a restore of saved partition table, & lilo -U to uninstall everything (aim was to get back to Win2k "as it was before" then proceeed to install somewhere other than MBR).
This got us back to Win2k booting, apparently OK, but with NO visibility of all the partitions I had created when installing the disk & Win2k (kept just the OS in C:\).

- dug out my old MaxBlast 3 bootable CD & re-read Maxtor site, suspecting it would help me return to the "original" partitiontable.
Found the option to "restore partitiontable" so used it...
This was BAD; as Windows now refuses to boot, gives a stop Error 0x0000007B (Inaccessible Boot Device).

- Start up recovery console; chkdsk claims that there are irrecoverable errors on C:; MAP shows several partitions, including one called C: that is around the right size, but no filesystem type listed against it...

- AS this is turning into a "fight PC + Windows" session, not sure how much sympathy I'll get on this board, so will post an update to my question in the Maxtor help board to see if there any low level disk / partition editors available that can help me recover the maximum from the disk before resorting to the last option of wipe all & start again....

TIA,
Charlie.