I bought a pc with dos/win98 pre-installed. I installed red hat 6.2 on another partition. Here is my problem. When I created the new partitions, I made the windoz partition a lot smaller than I want. Then I fiddled with things and removed all partitions. Now my problem is I can't load dos or windoz on my machine. I tried to load dos and it says to reboot, when I reboot, it automatically goes to lilo (which I can't get rid of) It doesn't recognize dos at all so I can't load dos. Any suggestions?

If you have a Windows emergency start-up disk then simply boot from this and at the DOS prompt type:- FDISK /MBR This will re-write the Master Boot Record enabling you to go in to DOS/Windows! I don't know what partitioning tools you are using but from experience I can definitely recommend Power Quests Partition Magic, top bit of software! If you have any problems feel free to e-mail me and I'll see if I can help! Regards, Paul

If you install LILO on the root of the partition instead of the boot sector, you won't have that problem. Just make sure to set the LILO parition as bootable.

I'm having issues with lilo, I only get LI out of it so I have to use my boot floppy to get into linux. Paul, are you saying to fdisk from /a ?? I tried that before and it wouldn't go. I guess I'll try it again. Thanks!

Samantha, Boot on the Win 9x floppy and type fdisk/mbr This will automatically put your old master boot record back in your C: . This even put my Power Quest Boot Magic back in, and my PC worked just as it did before intalling Linux. But now I have to use my Linux floppy boot disk to start Linux. LILO will boot the other O/S but I am not able to set it up properly. I am a newbie. And not a good reader or have the time to spend doing a lot of reading. Tom

The dual-boot method works but the best way is to pick up a seperate hard drive for Linux and use removable drive racks. The Vipower mobile racks are about 20 bucks each and work well. I have a dual-boot Windows 98/mandrake 7.1 drive but find it much more convenient when trying out differebt distros to keep them seperated on multiple drives. Hard drives are cheap and you don't need over a couple gig just to learn Linux.

try here www.vmware.com it might help to know.