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?
>
>
>   
You don't need any helper sofware.  MSDOS and Windows 98 have all the 
facilities to install themselves.  Just keep deleting all partitions 
until you have none left.  Then create the largest partition you can up 
to the limitations of Win 98 and make it the primary partition so it can 
boot.  I've done it a hundred times.  If you don't need to save anything 
on the HD, just delete it all.  What's the worry?

Follow the KISS method, for sure.
Alex

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