messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

[Alex Janssen]

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

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