Re: wheres my Win 98 C: drive gone?

[Goran Koruga]

Hi,

if you can still access it in Linux then check what does fdisk think
about the partition, notably partition type. I have never seen GRUB done
any weird things like that, but there were some issues with GRUB when
being installed on a disk with EZ-drive on it (the thing that allows you
to access large disks on machines with crappy BIOS). There's also
fsck.msdos available for Linux, but I would use that as a last resort,
especially because you can access it in Linux.

Cheers,
Goran

> 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
> 
> 
> 


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