messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

[das]

On Mon, 2007-04-30 at 23:29 -0400, Alex Janssen wrote:
> You don't need any helper sofware.  MSDOS and Windows 98 have all the 
> facilities to install themselves. 

No, they don't. I don't know if it has ever happened to you or not.
Quite a few times I have seen the Partition tables get messed up. Some
power cut during partitioning or defragment, some serious voltage
fluctuation, trying to create NTFS partition, and, in many cases,
without any definite reason. Both in MSW-only and dual-boot or
multi-boot machines, I had quite a lot of experience of this order.
Particularly for our local linux group I installed linux (SuSE, Slack,
Mandrake of that time, and obviously Ubuntu for the last one year or so)
in a lot of machines, and handled quite a few of them. So many times I
have seen that MSW cannot handle problems cooked up by itself. From its
Fdisk if you delete the non-dos in the extended one, it says it does,
but actually it does not, and misreports the disk-space. Or, problems
like that. In MSW-ME and MSW-98 it was quite a common problem. Situation
became a bit better in MSW-XP and 2000. Don't know what it is in Vista.
And, curiouser is the thing that I have seen Linux fdisk running in
'rescue' mode succeed in every occasion. I just delete all of them,
create a new VFAT and exit and then, MSW installers can handle it very
well. I partition this VFAT into MSW's FAT-32 and start installing. 

Due to this big difference in our experience, it seems there maybe a HW
factor there. I am talking about a economically backward district of a
third world perspective, usually low RPM low cost HD-s, processors and
all, with HW that are in no way up and coming: absolutely different
order of experience from a lot my friends in the West. And this may lead
to our differences in experience. 

---
das