From today i'm proud owner of triple boot system. XP, 2003 Server, Mandrake 9.1.
2K3 was last one installed, and he overwrite boot sector, so my lilo doesn't function anymore. And i cant boot to linux anymore. Ofcourse i can boot from cd, but...

I was wondering, how can i extract boot data from linux partiton, so i can use windows loader (set it up in win.ini) for all 3 systems? Without actually booting to linux.

I hope i was descriptive enough...

you need to reconfigure lilo and make it boot windows with chainloader. check the man page.

ok, if 2k3 installed it's boot manager over lilo- then you will need to reinstall lilo, or whatever bootloader you like...

the NT bootloader is also capable of multiple boots, but you need to configure it 1st here is an article on how to configure the windows nt bootloader.. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;105309 you should be able to go from there...

so inclosing... just re-install lilo or config NT's booter...

This is what I did when I installed Mandrake on my PC. (May be its lame but safest I guess)

I already had Win2k on it. While installing Mandrake 9.1 I installed GRUB on root partition of linux partition instead of MBR. And in windows I installed BootMagic which recoginises linux partition as well.

So at boot time, I get two options of booting into windows or linux.

Here I have one doubt. Is it possible that I remove GRUB and directly boot into Linux instead of going through GRUB?

./CR

@schnibble : cant u simply boot using a bootdisk, then fdiks /mbr, edit & reconfigure the boot.ini using the right partition infos? this will give u the basic "choose which OS to boot" menu, & u won't have to install any boot loader

@ codereverser: yes u can, i remember i had to boot into linux, copy a specific thing on a bootdisk, which would modify the mbr & then directly boot onto linux, google it

Perhaps i didn't explain real depth of my problem. Anyway after too much time i solved it... It's easy for 2 systems, but 3 is a bit tougher.

Now i use nt loader. What i did, is next.
In Mandrake i edited lilo.conf so it has only 1 option, and turned off all timers, promts and rest. That was my main problem, once i figured that out else was easy.

Then i used "dd" command to write first 512 bytes of partition, saved it on nt partition, and set it up in boot.ini. Also it must be specified this way:
c:/boot.lin,
and not this way:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)/boot.lin

So i repeat once more, the problem was in lilo.conf configuration. Becouse i could easely setup 2 loaders, but that wasn't the point.

Thnx everyone