messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

j arwood dontdrill at comcast.net
Sun Apr 29 23:30:31 UTC 2007


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?





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