Hi Doug, I tried fdisk /mbr and it worked easily. As expected, I only have a windows partition (verified by fdisk). I suspect that I'm less than halfway there.
This morning, I read that it shouldn't be used on disks that have more than four partitions. I have five partitions and some unclaimed space. I might try it later today.
I don't know where that came from.
It came from ms. Maybe they're just playin' with our heads.
However, once that is working, you can boot into your linux system (by one of the ways I mentioned in an earlier post, and run LILO which is smart enough to leave the Windows part working and simply add the stuff for other things you want to boot (as specified in lilo.conf --- which I assume is OK if it was working earlier and you have not edited it).
No, there's no lilo.conf and never was one on that installation. There is (was) a grub/menu.lst, which serves the same function, but as far as I understand it, the partition table needs to contain information about linux partitions for either of these to work. I went ahead and booted the rescue system and tried a grub-install /dev/hda, and it returned a message saying that no /dev/root was found. Maybe I'll try parted again, now that I can find where hda1 ends. Thanks, Greg