On 2005-01-24, Shannon Lloyd <sjlloydNO@SPAMlikwid.com> wrote:
> Art Clemons wrote:
>> Shannon Lloyd wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Am I able to simply boot up with the
>>>Slack installation CD, use it to boot into Slack, then rewrite LILO to
>>>the MBR?
>>
>>
>> First, XP normally doesn't write to the MBR for a repair. However you
>> can use the Slack CD as a boot CD and use it to boot whichever
>> partition Slack is on if XP does the unexpected or stupid since it is a
>> Microsoft product.
>
> I probably wasn't specific enough, but I was referring to doing a
> complete reinstall of the OS, in which case it does (alas) write over
> the MBR. On a slightly (but not really) related note, and at the risk of
> becoming somewhat OT for this NG, what if I create an image of my XP
> partition once I've got it set up (using Ghost or something similar),
> and then instead of reinstalling XP, simply restore the image to the
> partition? I would imagine that this would only write into the relevant
> partition, avoiding the MBR, yes? Might also help avoid the
> all-too-frequent calls to Microsoft to explain why I need to (yet again)
> reactivate my copy of XP.

Boot with the Slackware installation CD, and where it stops to ask
you for boot parameters, pass it something like this:

bare.i root=/dev/hda1

Where, of course, 'hda1' is your Linux system's root partition.

(When you boot with the Slack CD, it'll give you instructions for
this when it stops to ask for boot parameters.)