[ale] Boot drive has died. Suggestions, Mr. Spock?

[Joe Knapka]

Hello, folks,

I have a PC I use for development $work$ under
NT, and which also has Linux on it for real
work (i.e. play). It boots from OS/2 Boot Manager
but OS/2 is not (any longer) installed. The boot
drive contains the Linux root filesystem, OS/2BootMgr,
and a gratuitous 400MB FAT partition. The second
IDE drive contains the NT boot partition and also
another NTFS partition. The Linux /usr and /home
filesystems are on a separate SCSI drive. Boot
Manager allows me to select either the LILO on
hda3 or else the NT loader from hdb2.

The boot drive is dying. It ain't quite gone yet,
but it only boots maybe one in three tries.
I've ordered a replacement, which should arrive
tomorrow, but I am trying to figure out how to
re-establish a working dual-boot configuration,
given that I have neither the NT install CD nor
the OS/2 one on hand.

I'm thinking that I'll do a bare-bones Linux install
on the new drive, giving it a FAT partition and
a couple of e2fs partitions, and then set up
LILO in the MBR of the boot drive so that it
can either boot the new Linux install or the
old NT partition on the second IDE drive. Does
it sound like that will work? Anyone using
LILO as the MBR to boot Linux and NT 4 care
to share the contents of lilo.conf?

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

-- Joe Knapka
* I speak only for myself, except when the little transceiver
* at the base of my skull is activated...