LILO reinstallation

[fishybawb]

Hello.
My LILO boot loader appears to have bought the proverbial farm, and I don't seem to be having any luck reinstalling it. In my infinite wisdom, I decided not to create a boot disk when I installed, and booting off the installation cd and using the rescue function exits with the message "could not find your root device". I was dual booting with Windows, so I ran fdisk /mbr and Windows works fine, so it's not a problem with the drive itself. Any ideas? I'm using Mandrake 9.0.
If I can't get the boot loader fixed, are there any programs available to recover data from an ext2 partition under Windows?

[setoguro]

The bad news it I don't think you can get into Linux now with out that precious boot disk that you were to make when you installed linux. I've been in the same situation with out the boot disk and had to reinstall. I've learned my lesson and always make it now. Maybe someone else with more knowledge than me will show up and be able to help.

[mjc]

When you used fdisk /mbr you over wrote the pointers in the MBR to your linux partitions, because the Windows fdisk does not recognise the linux partition types (you would have the same problem if you had XP under NTFS and used Win98 fdisk). The partitions are still there, but there is nothing in the MBR to say that they are, so it would seem like they are either an unknown type or just unallocated space.

You might be able to get back in using something like XOSL (http://www.xosl.org), or some other third party bootloader.

This page has some useful advice...
http://www.northernjourney.com/opensource/newbies/newb023.htm

There is even a DOS version available to make the disk from Windows/DOS.


PS: Make the boot disk, after you recover....;)

[fishybawb]

Thanks for the info guys. I went for the re-install in the end, at the expense of several download hours worth of drivers and programs. Oh well, I made a boot disk this time! :)
Thanks again.