messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

[debiani386]

j arwood wrote:
> 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?
>
>   
Heres what i have done before and it worked, however i wasnt able to 
delete some of the linux partitions (they were small partitions though, 
so i didnt sacrifice much hard drive space).
First, in FDISK, i deleted the Extended DOS partition, but when i tried 
that, it gave me an error stating that there was a logical drive, but 
when i viewed the logical drive, i got the same response. So i got out 
the boot floppy that came with my hard drive (it was a maxtor hdd..yah i 
know i know, i didnt buy the hdd) and formatted it with there formatter. 
It wipped most of the hard drive and added a FAT32.

If you would like, i could send you a copy of the floppy disk. It should 
work on her hard drive, i tested it and ran it on other hard drives (my 
other 2 ibm hdds)

--cj