wheres my Win 98 C: drive gone?

[Martin Shaw]

Hello,

I had a quick search through the emails, but could not find anything
recent obviously matching my problem. Either too many items matched my
keywords (like windows'), or none matched.

I own a Win 98/Caldera OpenLinux machine. Dual boot via Boot Magic, but
under Linux it claimed to use grub - though it did not look like it IMO.

I recently installed RH 7.2, and found that boot magic could not find
the partition where RH had been installed - due to the repartitioning
software that RH uses. A mutual incompatibility I thought I could fix
with grub.

Well, it turns out grub did allow me to boot RH and Caldera, but in the
process it did something unusual to my Win 98 C: drive.

I can no longer boot Win 98.

C: is not readable, I get the retry, ignore and fail messages if I do
when I boot from floppy.

The boot magic recovery floppy, which I'd checked as working before I
attempted this changeover to grub no longer works, seems it requires
files on C: - sounds like a silly thing for a recovery disk to do, but
there you go!!!!

It would therefore seem I have a corrupted C: drive - but wait.

I had prudently dumped the win98 CD to the E: drive when I got this PC,
so E:\win98cd\win98\scandisk C: ought to repair C: Sadly, it says that
C: does not exist. It will quite happily let me scandisk any other
WIndows partition.

Likewise win 98 setup can not find my C drive. Quite how I am supposed
to re-install Win 98 under these conditions is beyond me.

It gets stranger though, if I start Linux and cd to /mnt/c (which is my
mount point for this missing partition), I can see all the files. I can
copy them and access them as if C: were working properly. So I could
recover fdisk, format or the entire contents of C: to another partition
if needed.

So, what on Earth had grub done to my C: partition, and do you have any
ideas how I can persuade Win 98 to read a C: drive that Linux has no
difficulty with.... and to get grub to boot this WIn 98 partition once
its been fixed.

Naturally, I'd prefer not to alter the MBR (via aa WIndows install or
putting boot magic back on) if I can avoid it.

-- 
Martin Shaw
address@hidden