Boot Loader Recovery

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I recently installed Mandrake Linux. I like it but it left my Win2k install without it’s own boot loader; it was replaced with LILO. Any idea how to restore my Win2k boot loader?

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Hi Dean,

You need to boot with a DOS floppy that has FDISK on it and enter FDISK /MBR to restore the previous boot loader/boot sector. ALternately you should be able to boot with the Win2000 CD and repair the boot sector.

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Oops! Forgot to mention I’m running NTFS. No DOS floppies for me. I’ll examine the cd restore over the weekend.

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Your Win2k boot loader is still alive under LILO – typing DOS will call Win2k loader. I don’t know the way to boot to Win2k loader first except using third-party loader as Partition Commander or similar…

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Even if you are using NTFS I would have thought that FDISK /MBR would have still fixed it.

The reason being that if you boot from a floppy with both a DOS system and FDISK on it then you’ve got the whole maintenance environment on the floppy, seeing that you’re modifiyng the boot and partitioning areas and not the NTFS it should still work.

Can someone whose actually done this please clarify it for us.

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Yes, the shell and tools are all there on the floppy, but that command interpreter doesn’t know NTFS. There will be no drive C visible. It only understands FAT16 and FAT32.

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Oh, but I thought that didn’t matter with the /MBR switch as this worked only on the boot record and that’s before NTFS starts. Ok, you’re probably right, I’m just not sure anymore. There are other versions of non-Microsoft ‘FDISK’ I’ve used previously that overcome some of these limitations. I’ve had to use them perviously for similar problems with Linux partitons (which FDISK didn’t recognize either), if I recall correctly they worked ok.

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