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When Lilo overwrites a boot sector, it saves a backup copy in /boot/boot. xxyy, where xxyy are the major and minor numbers of the device, in hex. You can see the major and minor numbers of your disk or partition by running "ls -l /dev//device''. For example, the first sector of /dev/hda (major 3, minor 0) will be saved in /boot/boot.0300 , installing Lilo on /dev/fd0 creates /boot/boot.0200 and installing on /dev/sdb3 (major 8, minor 19) creates /boot/boot.0813 . Note that Lilo won't create the file if there is already one so you don't need to care about the backup copy whenever you reinstall Lilo (for example, after recompiling your kernel). The backup copies found in /boot/ are always the snapshot of the situation before installing any Lilo.If you ever need to uninstall Lilo (for example, in the unfortunate case you need to uninstall Linux), you just need to restore the original boot sector. If Lilo is installed in /dev/hda , just do "dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1'' (I personally just do "cat /boot/boot.0300 > /dev/hda'', but this is not safe, as this will restore the original partition table as well, which you might have modified in the meanwhile). This command is much easier to run than trying "fdisk /mbr'' from a DOS shell: it allows you to cleanly remove Linux from a disk without ever booting anything but Linux. After removing Lilo remember to run Linux' fdisk to destroy any Linux partition (DOS' fdisk is unable to remove non-dos partitions).If you installed Lilo on your root partition (e.g., /dev/hda2 ), nothing special needs to be done to uninstall Lilo. Just run Linux' fdisk to remove Linux partitions from the partition table. You must also mark the DOS partition as bootable.LILO mini-HOWTO got feedback? by hacheelle |