Being a newbie to the linux world, I will need lots of help, but first things first. I originally re-partitioned my w98 and installed mandrake and everything worked fine. LILO allowed me to choose where I wanted to boot and boots were successful. While trying to tweak my linux install, I started freezing up so I re-installed linux. Now I can get into linux, but not into w98. I have tried to dos-boot from floppy, it doesn't see my windows partition. Fdisk sees a non-windows partition where my windows partition should be, but linux sees a WIN95 FAT32. If I remove the linux partitions and try to boot up, I get 0101010101.... scrolling down the screen. I have tried fdisk /mbr but that didn't work either. HELP!!!

damn thats f---ed up to fix it you would have to be a computer guru or hire some prick to do it for you if i was in your stop i would just format and start from scratch

that's not what I wanted to hear. Is there anyway that you know of to retrieve some critical files from the win partition before I reformat the whole thing?

Could you clarify "tweak my linux install"? What exactly did you do? (in 99% of the cases syphunsoul is right)

I was having trouble with my mouse configuration (didn't know what I was doing, but I've figured that out now) and my sound card (still don't know what I'm doing and still haven't figured that one out..but that is another story).

JNP, I am in your shoes. I had Windows ME installed on my machine and used another drive for Linux (Red Hat 6.0). I added the drive and then loaded Linux. I edited the gnome-linuxconf file to read LILO from the MBR on /dev/hda1. After realizing that Linux typically installs a lot easier on my older, crappier machine (which does not use a stupid win modem and also has an older video card), I edited the gnome-linuxconf file to read from /dev/hdb5 and deleted the entry for ME. I shut down the machine and removed my linux hard drive. I rebooted and received the scrolling 0's and 1's. I have not tried the fdisk /mbr command yet because I was just looking around to find someone with the same error. I can boot to dos mode with the CD but can not boot to Windows. Please let me know if you or anyone else ever found a resolution. If the fdisk command does not work, then I read in another place that you can run the upgrade utility for LINUX and under the packages portion, select LILO only and deselect all other apps. This will re-install it to the location you specify. Afterwards, I will then try the fdisk command. Hope it fixes it. If not, then my wife is going to kill me. But I can recover the files she needs and then split my larger hard drive and load something else besides ME.

Fdisk /mbr did not work for me. I knew it wouldn't because it was just to good to be true. I formatted my other hard drive, set it to primary and loaded ME on it. I took the other drive, set it to slave, rebooted and copied over things that "MY WIFE" needed and then reloaded ME on the other hard drive and replaced all of her missing items. I did get to partition out the drive that way when I do this again, ha, I can just blow the OS partition away and re-install without having to worry about any lost items. Lesson learned. Also, I tried calling Maxtor, the manufacturer of the hard drive, and they said if fdisk /mbr did not work, then I was hosed. FYI... Also re-installing LILO did not work either.