Re: messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

j arwood said the following on 04/29/2007 07:30 PM:
Hey Folks,

This is kinda off topic, but I'm not really all that familiar with DOS's
fdisk or the mbr and thought someone her could lend a hand

I have a client whose Windows ME crashed, so I thought we'd try her on
Ubuntu. She's decided that she really doesn't want to screw with the
learning curve, and wants to reinstall 98SE (the only install disk she
has) then upgrade to XP (yeah I know, I know).

I booted up her system using the 98 floppy, ran fdisk and deleted the
non DOS partitions thinking that would get things rockin' for the 98
setup cd. NOT!

She has an 8 GB HDD and now fdisk is only showing 2 partitions:
Partition 1 as an Extended DOS partition 353 MB
Partition 2 as a Primary DOS partition 24 MB With a status of A (active
I'm assuming)

it Then goes on to say:
Total disk space is 8056 MB (which should be correct for a 8 GB drive)
The Extended DOS Partition contains Logical DOS Drives

when I display the logical drive info I get:
No logical drives defined
Total Extended DOS partition size is 353 MB

I then decided to try booting from an Ubuntu live cd to completely wipe
the drive and try again. When the CD tries to boot, I get a grub error 22.

Looks like there's some kind of bootloader (grub/mbr) issues at hand.

Anyone able to help me out to help this lady out?



Just run fdisk and delete all partitions, if you don't want what is on
them, and create a single primary partition less than 32 GB, check the
limits on Win98. Reboot the computer and format the new partition.
Then run the Win 98 Install.

If you have the Win XP upgrade disk, don't bother installing Win 98.
Just start with the XP upgrade. It will prompt you to put in the Win 98
CD to verify that you qualify for an upgrade then continue with the install.

Too bad you can't talk her into trying Ubuntu. My sister's the same
way. She knows Windows and is afraid of learning something new. She
wants others to be able to jump right in there and get something working
and nobody in her real estate world knows anything about GNU Linux. The
computer, to her, is an appliance. It had better just work. Not that
GNU Linux doesn't work. Maybe your client's the same.

As soon as MS drops support for XP, I am poised to start installing GNU
Linux, Ubuntu, in it's place. I've had everybody in my company using
T-bird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org for over a year, now. They'll hardly
know they've switched. Company users I talk to say they don't care what
the o.s. is as long as they can still do their work.

Good luck,
Alex

--
Ourwoods.org
Always cut the cards. (14)


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