From: benj@s-link.escape.de (Benjamin Harling) Subject: Re: remove LILO? Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 12:00:00 +0100
CHCHEN%STAT@S-UUCP.ZER meinte am 23.01.93
zum Thema "remove LILO?":
> From: chchen@stat (Ching-Hsiang Chen)
> Subject: remove LILO?
> Message-ID: <1993Jan23.093342.24069@mailer.cc.fsu.edu>
> Organization: Florida State University
>
> I am going to have a new 200mb IDE drive next week and my old 105mb IDE
> will be in my wife's PC. I had installed LILO before I saw the backup
> MBR caution in the LILO documentation. I am 99% sure that LILO had taken
> over DOS MBR. Is the only way to remove LILO and Linux from my old IDE
> to destroy all partitions setup (including my DOS partition)?
My Coherent manual says that if you changed the MBR and did not backup the
original, one way to work around is to destroy the MBR, either with the
program which wrote it or with some kind of tool (Norton Utilities or likes or
with the DIAGNOSTICS menu of the AMI BIOS) and have it rebuild by DOS fdisk.
You just have to overwrite the last two bytes. If no valid signature appears
at the end of the current contents of the Master-Boot-Block, DOS fdisk will
write a new one. But there is no guarantee that fdisk will actually do so.
Their experience is that you shouldn't expect any data to be available after
fdisk rewrites an invalid MBR, even if previously existing DOS partitions
are re-allocated with identical cylinder ranges as at the time of their
initial creation. So backup your stuff.
The other way is to overwrite it with an MBR from another OS, which might
work with the OS/2 BootManager.
Gruss Benjamin