I'm at the end of my wits on an install-gone-wrong. Is it time to wipe my hard drive slick??? Here's my situation:

I installed Linux at the end of a 30 GB drive (way beyond the 1024 limit, which I learned about after the fact), and LILO wrote to the MBR "bad geometry", leaving the machine unbootable from the hard drive for Win2K or Linux (I can still boot from floppy to DOS or Linux).

Currently, when the machine boots from the hard drive, I see "L 00 00 ..." (repeat to \infty). I have tried every trick I could find to uninstall LILO and recover my old MBR. First I changed my lilo.conf file to say boot=/dev/hda1 and ran /sbin/lilo. Then I tried,

"dd if=/boot/boot.0300 of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1"
"dd if=/boot/boot.0301 of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1"
"fdisk /mbr" (from dos)
"lilo -U /dev/hda" (got this one from the MS web site!)

Nothing has worked, still "L 00 00 00 00 ...." At this point, I'm just trying to make the machine bootable and save my Windows setup. Otherwise, I have to wipe the drive and get on with my life....

Here is my lilo.conf:
# begin file
boot=/dev/hda1
map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
linear
default=linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14-5.0
label=linux
read-only
root=/dev/hda7

other=/dev/hda1
label=dos
#end file

I cant see clearly from ure post if uve got W2K set up properly, but if it is u can use the W2K install CD & ERD disk to get W2K back on the MBR with the repair option.
Boot Linux & set Lilo up in Linux' own partition.
Then add a linux bootsector to W2K's bootloader menu.

Another approach is to first try booting into Linux.
If Lilo hasnt been installed over and over with the -b option, Lilo saves a backup bootsector in /boot before mutilating it :-]
If Lilo was using the MBR U can use "dd" to restore the MBR:
dd if=/boot/boot.nnnn of=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 ; sync
where /boot/boot.nnnn is the old bootsector to use (look at the nnnn date)

If this somehow wont work u can use a Dos bootdisk and fdisk /mbr to restore it.

Good luck.

Thanks for the help. I tried this but it actually made things worse. I eventually ended up not being able even to boot from a floppy --- partition table completely messed up. After 2 solid days of stress (and no work done!), I dropped back 15 yards and wiped the drive clean.

Thanks to all who offered suggestions. Hopefully I won't be posting after trying my next install!