Can't boot with Mandrake linux drive removed

This is due to the body of the boot program (including the image of the selection screen) is residing on the physical disk you just removed, and the initial boot is so small that it cannot complain in a more verbose way.

The PC hardware boots up by reading the very first sector (512 bytes) of the boot drive (the first hard disk, here). The boot sector has hard-coded the address where to load the bootstrap program, which is some kilobyte to about 100 kilobytes in size, depending on which bootstrap your setup is using. The address hard-coding is done when the bootstrap is installed.

I see a couple of solutions:

1. Install the XP boot into the bootstrap sector by booting the XP CD and running 'fixmbr'. This requires the re-installation of the Linux boot after you return the Mandrake disk to service.

2. If the boot of the Mandrake system is GRUB, get it from the installation CD and chain-load the XP boot from there manually (See the GRUB manual for details).

3. If your computer can boot from diskettes, get a GRUB boot diskette and proceed as above.

HTH

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Tauno Voipio tauno voipio (at) iki fi