Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 10954
Installer loses Win98 boot information
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
The installer has the same problem as I reported in Bug #6310 (duplicate of #5497) which I submitted back in October 1999. It was reported as resolved in February 2000, but the email I got reporting the resolution gave no clue about getting a fixed installer. The last installer update is dated 22-Oct-99. Essentially, the installer is not recognizing multiple boot partitions. This means that when I install Linux 6.2 on my system, Windows 98 is completely disabled. I used the latest anaconda boot disks as of today's date: boot-20000407.img update-disk-20000407.img I also found that the instructions given in "Removing Red Hat Linux" (p. 93) in the 6.2 Installation Guide do not work. The instructions claim that to replace the MBR with an earlier saved version, execute "/sbin/lilo -u". I did this and when the system attempted to boot Lilo, the prompt came back as "LI" and hung there. The only recourse to fixing these problems was to reinstall 6.0 from scratch. The 6.0 installer works fine. Please fix this problem soon. If it is not fixed soon, I will return both versions 6.1 and 6.2 for a refund, as they are completely useless to me. Thank you.
Please submit a copy of your /etc/lilo.conf file in addition to your /etc/fstab file. I am not able to replicate this situation here in the test lab. As for restoring your system to it previous state using "lilo -u" as the manual describes, this did indeed work as expected, it is just that your previous saved MBR also had lilo installed (from previous installations) In order to restore Windows to a bootable state, boot the machine using a DOS boot disk and issue the command "fdisk /MBR" This will restore the DOS MBR sector and you will be able to boot Windows then.
Closing this bug due to lack of activity.