Hllo everybody .This is the detaill of what happened . I formatted C drive and installed xp sp2 ,before this i had installed linux mandrake 10.2 2005 LE,but as i said i formatted C drive LILO got deleted (i think so,since the options for choosing diff OS are not displayed any more).so now i am not able to use linux.Can anybody plz help me get out of this problem.Thank you...
you need to reinstall Lilo somehow. i'm loathe to recommend too much as it's been some years since i did this myself; i'd rather someone who's done this recently would comment. I am rebuilding a few PC's at the moment (involving dual-boot or maybe even triple boot of one of them) and if i get a chance to simulate your problem i'll paste the answer here. But until then, 'fraid the cobwebs are in the way of me helping you
As you formatted the drive and installed XP then there is no linux on the drive any more. You will have to repartition and reinstall your linux.
ah, you can tell i was moderating when i replied to this one before, too much multitasking I had interpreted the opening post such that maybe the Linux partition(s) had survived the format, hence my concentrating on Lilo. However it's more likely that you blew the lot away ?, hence Jan's reply..
Thankz everyone.I'm really thankful to everybody for the immdt response. I m sorry to say that i didn't mention the problem properly.Let me mention it once again(hope i dont make any mistakes this time ). I had the following partitions:-> C,D,E,and 20GB unallocated space. Initially I installed XP sp2 in C.Then i installed Mandrake 10.2 LE 2005 in the unallocated space(20 GB).So i think the new Linux installation changed the MBR (MBR resides in hd0 i.e C: right!, if i'm wrong plz read it correctly) and inserted its own option for booting to be displayed at the begininig. Then i simply formatted C: and installed XP sp2 ,so the old MBR entry was deleted and a new entry was put up in its place b'coz of this new installation.So its pretty obv that WinXP starts without asking for any choice .And b'coz of this m not able to use linux anymore.Now I did something messy.I unallocated around 8GB free space from one of the earlier partitions and deleted that partition and in this new unallocated space I installed Ubuntu 5.10.Luckily Ubuntu detected the older Mandrake installtion and made an entry for booting to this OS in its GRUB.So now, though I'm able to login to Madrake ,m not able to login to the graphical mode,but the command mode per se.But I want to use the graphical mode alongwith the command mode.So here ends my story.Thank you for having patience to read upto this much. Plz help me solve this problem.Thank you very much.
a-ha i think i get it know, i thought as much (regarding linux still being there); as for Mandrake you just need to fix the graphics. Gotta get on the motorway soon but you may have a bit of luck with this - 'XFree86 -configure'. i never have much luck fixing graphical screw-ups, not quickly anyway, mine always take ages
Thanx Creaky... I'm afraid that i couldn't make anything out of your response so will you take some pain in explaining ur response in a bit detail so that a newbie like me can also understand.I'll be highly obliged. Thank you.
ah ok, i've re-read your previous reply. I'd (possibly mistakenly) assumed your graphical environment was broken. Looks like you just neded to know how to start it. Glad you didn't understand it hence didn't try it and (potentially) break something on my behalf.. To start the graphical environment you simply type 'startx' at the command line. (next time you reboot it will go back to command line) ...so to re-enable graphical environment on bootup as opposed to command line, you need to edit one line in the file /etc/inittab to use runlevel 5. This is what the line needs to look like - id:[bold]5[/bold]:initdefault: (There's a way of doing this in the GUI somewhere i think but i don't trust GUI's to make things 'stick' so i get under the hood and make important changes manually).. Also, here's a blatant copy/paste from the inittab file explaining what the runlevels are - Hopefully that makes more sense now
