Where is Lilo?

[Kowood]

I installed Knoppix to my hdb drive, but several pieces were missing, so I simply cleared the drive. Lilo still comes up, and when it asked me where I wanted it, I chose the MBR. Where in my Windows 98 partition (hda1) might the MBR be? Or is it somewhere else? How do I get rid of Lilo?

[Harry Kuhman]

... Where in my Windows 98 partition (hda1) might the MBR be? ....

The MBR is the first sector of the bootable hard drive (normally hda1). It shares this space with the partition table, which is at the end of the sector. It is not part of any Windows partition. There is a boot loader installed at the beginning of a bootable Windows partition, it's usually reached by a small routine that windows installs in the MBR or can be reached by Lilo, Grub or Smart Boot Manager or XOSL (or any other boot loader).

I installed Knoppix to my hdb drive, but several pieces were missing, so I simply cleared the drive. Lilo still comes up, and when it asked me where I wanted it, I chose the MBR. ...... Or is it somewhere else? How do I get rid of Lilo?

If you have installed Lilo to the MBR, you can get rid of it by installing something else over it. The MSDOS command FDISK has an option fdisk /mbr that rewrites the MBR, but fdisk seems to be missing from my XP install. Other boot loaders will install something in the MBR; if you get the installer for Smart Boot Manager you can install that to the MBR (it will fit completely in the MBR) and use that to boot windows and/or Linux. I use SBM or XOSL on systems to load multiple OSs. I find this much cleaner than using Lilo; you just let Lilo install to the Linux partition rather than to the MBR, then you never have to worry about removing Lilo or editing config files and reinstalling it.

[harken]

Might be a bit off-topic but it's the first time I see this problem at someonelse othe than me:

but fdisk seems to be missing from my XP install

I have the same problem with my XP Pro install. On an WIn 98 floppy boot disk I have fdisk but it reports a wrong size of my HD (120GB). It says it's only around 50 GB. I searched the MS site and found out that fdisk won't work with HDs bigger than 64GB but there's a patched version of fdisk that can do that. I downloaded it yet it says it has to be run in MS-DOS mode. Ok, I boot in MS-DOS mode, try to run it again and..."incorrect version of MS-DOS".

So, if I want to run fdisk and get the desired effects, what on Earth should I do? Of course, there are tools like Partition Magic but what if I want to do it in MS-DOS?

[Markus]

You can boot with the XP cd into recovery console and give the commands fixboot and fixmbr.

[Harry Kuhman]

.... On an WIn 98 floppy boot disk I have fdisk but it reports a wrong size of my HD (120GB). It says it's only around 50 GB. I searched the MS site and found out that fdisk won't work with HDs bigger than 64GB but there's a patched version of fdisk that can do that....

Actually, many versions of Fdisk will partition drives larger than 64 gig, but they lie to the user about how big the drives (and partitions) are! They can be used if you just don't believe the reported sizes (which is how I formatted my first large drives). And, you'll find that the version you have from Win98 just isn't gonna make NTFS partitions (if you want them). There are different tools in XP, but it's a real pain for those of us who learned the ins and outs of fdisk, since the tools work completely differently (but what would you expect from MS).

[harken]

There are different tools in XP, but it's a real pain for those of us who learned the ins and outs of fdisk, since the tools work completely differently (but what would you expect from MS).

Indeed, I learned pretty well to fdisk but since XP the partitioning of disks looks like a nightmare. Some might say that the installation CD does it for you. Ok, what if I don't want to (or can't) do it that way?
Damn, this kind of things have built up my list of reasons for I wanna dump Windows. Now I'm getting used more and more to Debian and even if you "get your hands dirty" you'll eventually make it run like a dream (compared to the MS nightmare).

Long live Linus!