Hi Linuxers,

I'm having problem booting into my linux installation. I have Win XP on C: drive and root is on hda8. Recently, I had to re-install XP due to which, I guess, the MBR has got overwritten. Now, I don't get LILO on bootup. My distro is Mandrake 9.1 .

Before re-installing XP, I had created a boot floppy from the Mandrake Control Centre module. I tried to boot using this floppy. It gives the boot prompt. I tried several commands at this prompt:

/sbin/lilo linux linux image=/boot/vmlinuz linux root=/dev/hda8

Nothing works. Error message thrown up is "kernel image not found" or something like that. The floppy contains only one file by the name of "ldlinux"

Next, I tried to use the rescue mode from the installation CD. The steps I followed are:

1. Boot into installation CD.

2. Press F1 for more options.

3. Type rescue at the boot prompt.

4. Screen shows - "Please wait - Loading program into memory" and shows these options at the bottom - "Alt-F1 for here, Alt-F3 to see the logs, Alt-F4 for kernel msgs".

5. On pressing Alt-F3, screen shows - *found a Mandrake Linux CDROM, good news! *trying to load /tmp/image/Mandrake/base/rescue_stage2.bz2 as a ramdisk

6. On pressing Alt-F4, screen shows- <4> hdc : ATAPI reset complete <6> end_request : I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 1261592 <4> hdc : cd_rom_decode_status : status=0x51 {DriveReady SeekComplete Error} <4> hdc : cd_rom_decode_status : error=0x30 LastFailedSense 0x03

...and on it goes.

After some time, the main screen gives this message-

"ERROR - Could not uncompress second stage ramdisk. This is probably an hardware error while reading the data. (this may be caused by a hardware failure or a linux kernel bug)"

On pressing OK the screen goes blank and nothing happens. My installation CD is a little scratched but it used to work perfectly earlier. Could this be the problem? Is there any other way that I can remedy this situation? Please help.

Regards, Sarfaraz Kazi

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none have tried to contact us.

- Calvin.

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