I managed to get a new 80Gb drive for my machine to replace the the verry full 30Gb drive I had in it, so I happily went off and ghosted the old drive to the new, changing a few of the partition sizes along the way, and getting everything ready.
I went from /boot 15Mb, C: 22Gb, D: 6Gb to /boot 55Mb C: 30Gb, D: 25Gb linux 25Gb which means I can reinstall linux and continue down the path to freedom, but that wasn’t the snag I hit.
The snag was that the machine wouldn’t boot.
The LILO that was on the boot partition has obviously lost track of where Windows was sitting and simply sat with LI on the screen. I tried a win98 disk to fdisk /MBR no luck. I booted of the 2K disk and ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR from the recovery console but no luck. I then tried to do the same again but the machine blue-screened during the process, just before it got the recovery console!
I then tried a variety of linux rescue disks which told me I didn’t have linux installed anymore (which I new, but I still had a broken Linux boot loader.) I might have been able to fix it from there but in the end I grabbed the most recent linux I had available, Fedora Core 1 and just installed it.
Problem solved! This time I made a boot disk as well. 🙂