Problem one to be expected is ” I cannot Boot Linux Anymore”. It seems that you have successfully installed the Linux distro of your choice. Then one fine day you may a change to your Windows OS- Windows 09 , XP or Vista / System 7/ Suddenly Linux no longer seems to boot and indeed stops working. You no longer see the lilo boot prompt. so you can no longer specify that indeed you wan to boot Linux.

What to do ? It seems that various operating systems tend to think that they are the only ones in the universe. It not unlike media centers in Windows that when newly installed take over and make themselves l”King” the “default” setup.

Therefore when the new Operating System is installed they write things to the area of the system or specifically the hard drive – or now sometimes solid state “hard drives”, called the Master Boot Record (MBR). This process overlays and overwrites the basic Linux boot loader (called LILO) and stops you dead in your tracks from booting Linux.

Overall the best correction is a good prevention . Make an emergency floppy or usb stick as a boot disk.

Keep this handy, when you do update or change your system ( or during any other significant event in your “Linux career” , such as repartitioning your disks or rebuilding your kernel.

Thus if you make a mistake then you can boot with your boot device – be it floppy or usb stick , or cd / dvd.

Its not unlike safe mode in Windows.

Then when you have rebooted your system using your boot device , simply log on as “root”, then type LILO on the command line. This will repair the MBR ( Master Boot Record) reinstalling Lilo.

You are now off to the races !!!

Adger Linux

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