From: sasdjb@unx.sas.com (David Biesack) Subject: Re: Linux broke my computer! Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1993 17:20:10 GMT
manuel@engc.bu.edu (manuel Toledo-Quinones) writes:
>Not exactly. I guess that I was the magnificent source of stupidity
>that is neede to mess things so badly!
>The plan was simple, but naive! I did not remove the linux partition
>thinking that just running dos 'fdisk' on the drive was going to solve
>the problem. Also I did not remove 'LILO', which was being run
>automatically on boot-up. Now, what happens is that LILO comes up
>when I try rebooting, and the computer, of course, goes crazy if I
>don't stop it from booting the nonexisting linux. I can, however,
>still run dos from drive c.
>I though that just using the bootup floppy created by linux will
>hopefully provide me with a way of removing LILO. But now the floppy drives
>are crazy, and I can not read floppies nor bootup from them! They are not
>totally dead: drive A does a strange noise if I put a f.d. w/o write
>protection. It does not do anything if the disk is write protected. Drive
>B does not seem to be doing anything.
I'm a Linux newbie, but I'll give this a shot. Can you boot DOS from a
floppy? Your mail did not mention this. If so, run the DOS fdisk. As
per the FAQ:
FAQ: III.16) How can I remove LILO from my hard drive?
FAQ:
FAQ: ANSWER: Simple. First you need an MS-DOS 5.0 (or OS/2) bootable floppy
FAQ: with FDISK.EXE on it. Boot it and run the command
FAQ: FDISK /MBR
FAQ: which will (hopefully) restore your hard drive's master boot record to
FAQ: a standard MS-DOS (resp. OS/2) boot record. Now you can go back and
FAQ: reinstall LILO. :)
>I will be inmensily greatful if someone can give me a hand with this
>one. Should I just format the 340meg hard drive to see it that removes
>anything that might be left from linux there? Or is LILO somewhere in
>my C drive?
LILO modifies your MBR, I think, which is your problem.
>Again, all help will be greatly appreciated.
>manuel