ampster40@comcast.net wrote:

is there a way to have lilo write over the mbr after I've re-installed winxp?

I've done this in the past with Mandrake - but attempting to do so with SUSE isn't the same it appears.

I had a dual boot system with Winxp and SUSE 10, untill my winxp install went bad. This morning, after making sure I had a install disk 1 of SUSE 10, I reinstalled winxp to hda1 (going from memory here, might have wrong partition number - and am in M$ now).

Then I rebooted with the #1 SUSE install disk and choose Repair. That dropped me into cli. I then found my SUSE 10 partition (hda5 IRC) and mounted it.

I tried to run "lilo -C /mnt/main/etc/lilo.conf" but it reported that the boot and map was on different disks and errored out. Sorry I didn't write down the exact error msg.

I've noticed in lilo --help, there is a way for it to set the boot or map options, but I must be using the wrong syntax or something.

In searching for this issue, I found the usual "MS should be installed before Linux" stuff, but there has got to be a way around this - if another distro can do it.

Again, am stuck in M$ world for now - so I don't have many specifics to go from here. If anything else is needed to diagnose this, let me know and I'll do the reboot dance as many times as needed till I get my main O.S. back up!

TIA Steve Try doing a chroot /mnt/main right after you mount your drive. This will make Linux thing /mnt/main is actually / and the lilo command should work. (w/o /mnt/main in the path)

Buddy Coffey Advanced Electromagnetics