Please Help! Deleted LILO for dual booting, now can't load windows!

[Jikolobe]

Hey,

Please help guys. I had a hard drive install of back track 2.0 and configured lilo to dual boot. Yesterday I deleted the partition of back track without thinking about the boot loader. Now my laptop died, and won't load windows period. All that happens is the letter L appears followed by a bunch of 9's.

If anyone has any ideas of what to do, please let me know. I can burn CD's on this comp so hopefully I can create some sort of boot loader and transfer the right bootfile for windows back onto the HD.

Thanks

[Archangel-Amael]

Hey,

Please help guys. I had a hard drive install of back track 2.0 and configured lilo to dual boot. Yesterday I deleted the partition of back track without thinking about the boot loader. Now my laptop died, and won't load windows period. All that happens is the letter L appears followed by a bunch of 9's.

If anyone has any ideas of what to do, please let me know. I can burn CD's on this comp so hopefully I can create some sort of boot loader and transfer the right bootfile for windows back onto the HD.

Thanks

I think that if you have the windows cd you can insert it on startup and use the fixmbr command and it will fix the MBR
Also have a look at the lilo man page to learn more about the error codes,
exit code 99 means invalid second stage index sector.
windows 98 is something like fdisk/mbr.
good luck

[sunapi386]

Time lost is experience gained. Next time you'll know to do an MBR backup everytime you do something.
Backup:

dd if=/dev/sda of=Mbr-backup1 bs=512 count=1

Restoring:

dd if=Mbr-backup1 of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

In your case, I would attempt to install lilo.
1, create another partition.

fdisk /dev/sda
n
p
2
enter
+20M
w

Then reboot linux
2, edit your lilo.conf to reflect your windows partition

initrd=/boot/splash.initrd

lba32 # Allow booting past 1024th cylinder with a recent BIOS
boot = /dev/sda
message = /boot/boot_message.txt
prompt
timeout = 120
change-rules
reset
vga=791
other=/dev/sda1
label=WindowsXP
table=/dev/sda

3, install lilo

lilo -v

[Archangel-Amael]

Time lost is experience gained. Next time you'll know to do an MBR backup everytime you do something.
Backup:

Although your post is quite valid, if the OP can't follow a simple install procedure to get backtrack working then how can you expect him to follow what you posted? I don't mean no harm but seems the whole procedure in linux may be too much for him and there is no guarantee that he won't make another mistake and really bork it up. So it may be best for the OP to use the windows cd's to re-create his windows mbr and then he can proceed to bork his computer up again using linux. The main thing is the with the windows it is point and click no questions asked. But with linux it is possible to make more mistakes. Not to mention that the OP also posted:

Yesterday I deleted the partition of back track without thinking about the boot loader. Now my laptop died, and won't load windows period

So in order to write a new lilo file he will have to re-install bt.