[ale] Ok, I'm really hosed now.

[Michael Barker]

Last week I put out a question about a problem I was having with my dual
boot system.  It seems that I had inadvertantly mangled mbr on my
windows drive and the suggested fix I received was to do an fdisk /mbr
to rewrite it.  Well one of the things that I have overlooked that may
have an effect on the whole scenerio is that I had used  Partition
Commander to set up initially and this may have re-written mbr in a way
that fdisk could not fix, because it had no effect on the disk.

What did happen is that I lost my facility to access my secondary master
30G drive that contains Mandrake 8.1.  I booted through rescue to
Mandrake and ran /sbin/lilo.  However, I can not get to lilo when
rebooting.

Now I have to speculate because this is not my area of knowledge or
expertise.

I have an older Epox AMD 300 with Award BIOS.  I originally built with a
6G Matrox and last spring added a 30G Matrox.  When I installed I had to
install the Matrox drivers to see all of the drive.  This is what I
believe fdisk /mbr has hosed.  My dilema is that in order to reinstall
the install program wants to format the drive but I don't want to lose
Mandrake and all my data. 

The 6G Windows drive can be sacrificed as I rarely use it and have no
important data there.

Can someone help me to understand the problem and find a solution.  I
have some ideas as to how to recover but I dont want to confuse any one
with my illinformed speculation.  So knowledge and understanding is my
first need.

Michael

---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.