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[sindi keesan <keesan AT SDF.ORG>]

On a laptop with multiple operating systems (XP, BL2, BL3 and other 
linuxes) I was booting with lilo (boot.ini had a line in it referring
to c:\boot\bootsec5.lnx which was a copy of the first 512 bytes of 
/dev/hda5) when suddenly I would get LIL- instead of LILO.

I reran lilo the first few times this happened and things worked again
but today they did not.  So I edited lilo.conf to use /dev/hda6 instead
of /dev/hda5, copied the 512 bytes of that to c:\boot
(dd if=/dev/hda6 of=bootsec6.lnx bs=512 count=1
cp bootsec6.lnx /hd/boot)
and it works again.  Windows bootloader now looks at /dev/hda6 not 5.

See the archives for dual booting XP or 2K with linux using lilo.
It requires editing boot.ini.

I think the area of /dev/hda5 used by lilo must have worn out, as happens 
when hard drives no longer boot due to MBR area wearing out.  Can anyone 
explain this more technically?

This multi-boot method requires a FAT32 file system for XP, which means I
could also plug in a USB floppy drive and boot to DOS thence to BL to
fix things.  It does not seem to work with NTFS.

The laptop is a DELL Latitude D600 with a Dallas chip in the power adaptor 
and when the third wire breaks or the chip goes bad in adapter or laptop 
the two stop communicating and the laptop throttles the speed down from 
1600 to 600MHz.  I finally got it back up in XP, after a year, using 
Notebook Hardware Control (NCH) which is 2MB but requires 22MB of MS .NET 
2.  Today Windows wanted to download a 70MB update (for .NET 2 through 
3.5).  Has anyone reading this fixed this problem in linux?  It probably 
needs a kernel 2.6 with ACPI support.

Sindi Keesan