LILO is Evil, or That's Some Way To Fuck Up Your Computer

After a lot of inner debate I thought: "Hell, fuck it, let's do this shit".

So I whipped out the installation CDs for Mandrake Linux 8.0, and booted with disc one. Oddly enough it worked, and some minutes later I was in the "Configure partitions" screen.

I have two (old) hard drives. Win2K was installed on drive D:, which was Sec. Master, but booting was started from C:. Messy, eh? Anyway, both were formatted in NTFS, and Linux can't read that. Therefore I decided that I wouldn't touch C: and I'd only format D: (because it only had the OS and some recoverable programs) in ext2, and C: would be there when I wanted to reinstall Windows.

So far, so good. Installation went perfect as well as hardware detection, and since I chose the automatized mode, it didn't ask me about the boot loader. OK, now reboot your computer and you'll be good to go... sort of. All I got was long strings of zeroes and ones after the BIOS summary table, and obviously it scared me to death.

After this, because my stuff in C: was intact, I removed that drive, and left the newly formatted one in, so as to reinstall Linux and make the computer boot through it. HAH! When I turned the PC on it would either crash when "Detecting IDE drives" showed up or not detect the drive at all. Back in the drive went, as well the 01 madness.

OK, don't panic, this can be solved, just install Win2K again. HAH! Again! Somehow the Win2K setup program refused to go on because it "couldn't install the boot loader".

This was when the brutal truth struck me in the eyes. I installed my C: drive in my mom's PC, only to find out that all the files in it were... you guessed it, corrupted. I gave up. I formatted it and installed Win2K.

But what does all my grief mean to you, the Doom community member?

The shareware Freedoom episode - which I was pretty close to finish - is gone. So is a bunch of other really good stuff I was working on (Maonth knows what I'm talking about).

As well as my songs/MP3s.

And my porn archive.

This sucks.

I still had 19/20 in Physics anyway :DDDDD

Heh, Windows 2000...hahahahah

Windows 2k is teh SATAN!!! YOU R TEH SCREWED!!

Awwww man. This is one of the reasons why I was encouraging people to upload their levels as they develop them.

Nuno Correia said:

blablabla

But what does all my grief mean to you, the Doom community member?

The shareware Freedoom episode - which I was pretty close to finish - is gone. So is a bunch of other really good stuff I was working on (Maonth knows what I'm talking about).

blablabla

Consider yourself banned from #doom and #zdoom for lifetime.

j/k

YOU FUCKING IDIOT

I mean, I'm not mister backup myself, BUT EVEN I DO BACKUPS BEFORE FUCKING AROUND WITH FUCKING OPERATING SYSTEMS.

heh, oh well, just start over with everything. can't be that hard to get all the pr0n back, can it? ;)

Ct_red_pants said:

Windows 2k is teh SATAN!!! YOU R TEH SCREWED!!

So what are you using? Win98? No, probably WinRG.

I erased my partition table once, I had to rebuild it from memory by hand. Fortunately I knew roughly how the drive was mapped out.

Whoa....geez man, I'm sorry to hear that. I hate it when I have to re-format my hard drive. Takes forever and there's nothing to do whilst it re-formats.

boris said:

So what are you using? Win98? No, probably WinRG.

Win 95. old? maybe and yet it sill preferable to win 2k any day.

that really sucks man.

anyway, i used to have win ME. i hated it. it would totally die every other month almost. so after the second time i had to format my hard drive, i made a bunch of CD's with all my shit on it. I'm glad i did that because win ME did crash 2 more times. After that i upgraded to win XP, and haven't had a problem since then. i love XP :)

the bottom line, back up all your stuff, it couldn't hurt.

Ct_red_pants said:

Win 95. old? maybe and yet it sill preferable to win 2k any day.

Win2k is stable (great platform for developing programs on) and plays just about all the games you can get for Win9X (thanx to DirectX8). Win95 is nowhere near as stable as NT4/Win2k, but on the flip side it lets you play DOS games properly. WinME is teh evil, not Win2k. Haven't played with XP yet, will eventually get it one day.

LILO is very good and stable, just one thing. poor billgates does not want u to use another OS. however most LINUX versions offere different LILO's or GRUB's. i used mandrake 8.1 and it has worked fine on every OS i have tried DOS 6.22 to winXP. however u CAN restroe the boot sector with a simple command, however the command i dont have right now. next time u install LINUX do a custom or expert install. doing that LINUX will usally find setup problems and tell u. U can ever write the commands to the bootsector too

GooberMan said:

Haven't played with XP yet, will eventually get it one day.

Forget about DOS games in XP. man, i love privateer, just can't play it on my good machine because it needs to be run in DOS.

Win2k rules. 9x sucks. If you want to play DOS games, get yourself a separate machine, like an original Pentium ~100MHz or so, shove DOS on that.

Nuno Correia said:

So is a bunch of other really good stuff I was working on (Maonth knows what I'm talking about).

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

:(

ZarcyB said:
Win2k rules. 9x sucks. If you want to play DOS games, get yourself a separate machine, like an original Pentium ~100MHz or so, shove DOS on that.

But why shell out an extra 150 bucks when one computer dose it all?

no. I like having my cake and eating it to. that said, I realise that my arrangement dosn't suit everyone. and my use of 95 in more to do with bugit then games. still, if i could affort a new OS it would be 98.

Ct_red_pants said:

...if i could affort a new OS it would be 98.

Or you could use Linux, for free!

BAW HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!!! Good one!!

Sephiroth said:

poor billgates does not want u to use another OS.

Not true. I even used to use Win2k's boot manager to load Linux. You just have to copy it's boot record into a file on a FAT32 partition and set up Win2k/WinXP's boot manager to use this file as a boot image, and it will load linux just fine.

Nuno Correia said:
The shareware Freedoom episode - which I was pretty close to finish - is gone. So is a bunch of other really good stuff I was working on (Maonth knows what I'm talking about).

And my porn archive.

The horror!!
/Me shivers..

ouch, thats a shitload of bad luck there......Porn is recoverable anyway...:) The doom stuff...well damn, that sucks. :(

/me feels for Nuno.

I remember when I lost my Leprechaun Doom TC... you seem to be handling your loss with much less violence than I did.

Sephiroth said:

LILO is very good and stable

lilo is a braindead piece of crap. I'm glad that a lot of distributions are finally moving over to the vastly superior GRUB.

I should've gotten a way to make them backups, true. But somehow most components' connectors in my mother's PC (it has the CD-RW) are glued, which kinda makes me puke.

Anyway, thanks for the kind comments.

ZarcyB said:

Win2k rules. 9x sucks. If you want to play DOS games, get yourself a separate machine, like an original Pentium ~100MHz or so, shove DOS on that.

well, my old machine that i play dos games on is a 132mhz w/a 2gig hard drive. :D