Spencer Underground wrote: > > Has anyone had the pleasure of loading wincrap on a drive that previously > housed llinux? > I have had mild sucess with this. But I have a very stubborn WD that will > not forget the mbr of its previous life. I zero filled the drive and still > nothing. It shows the classic symptoms of a virus i.e. master boot record > modified ide drivers corrupt,,,,that sort of thing. But no virus found , at > least not at antivirus.com. Maybe I just need some better quality herb or > something, but I think lilo and win do not get along real nicely. > Incidentally, I had a simular situation on an NTFS drive. I was able to > repair the mbr and recover the data. But that was a different situation. > Still stemming from lilo and win. If you want to hose the MBR on a disk, just do something like `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda' Note that you don't point it to /dev/hda1 -- just hda. If you want to somehow recover an MBR, that's a bit more tricky, though LILO does keep the original MBR, usually in /boot/boot.0300 (for hda, the file would be slightly differently named if it's for a different drive). You can try to restore it by doing `dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/hda' or `/sbin/lilo -u'. Of course, this has two requirements: The OS that was installed before Linux has to have been DOS or Windows and those files have to still exist on the hard drive. If you can find a DOS/Win boot diskette with fdisk on it, just run `fdisk /mbr' -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Why are they called / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ apartments, when they're \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) all stuck together? [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]