How do I make a win98 bootdisk from Linux?

amp2000 · 12-21-2002, 07:20 AM

OK, I am getting really annoyed now

Windows gave me an error booting up a couple of months back, ie it was corrupt

It didnt bother me at the time as I just used it for games and didnt have the time to be playing any. Well seeing as it's xmas I decided to treat myself and got James Bond Nightfire

Anyway, I have no win98 bootdisk, I try run windows setup after booting from the win98 CD and it moans cos it cant figure out whats up with my drives

I have a 6.4 gig IDE, a 60 gig IDE and a 2 gig scsi in my machine, the windows partition is 2gig at the start of the 6.4 gig drive.
If I had a win98 bootdisk I would try using fdisk to format the win98 partition but I dont have one so I need to overcome this using Linux.
Google searches for a win98 bootdisk are all either a) e .exe file or b) click start - settings - control panel, you get the idea

Can someone just tell me the safest way to overcome this problem cos I do NOT want to f**k up anything on my Linux partitions.

Any ideas people?

Allen614 · 12-21-2002, 07:38 AM

How about disconnecting all your drives except for the 6.4. Making a linux boot disk before of course.

amp2000 · 12-21-2002, 07:51 AM

Thanks for the response but I doubt that will help.
The win98 partition is the first 2 gig on the 6.4 gig drive, the rest of that drive is linux, windows will still moan when I try run setup cos the windows partition wasnt formatted by M$ fdisk.

In my experience when I run windows setup all linux partitions ie ext3 should be invisible to windows, it should only see the 2 gig, am I wrong here????

Thanks

Allen614 · 12-21-2002, 08:05 AM

Exactly,your 98 disk should see a 2gig hdd and nothing else. Keep a copy of lilo.conf so you can rebuild it after 98 overwrites the MBR for that disk. What was the partition formatted with?

amp2000 · 12-21-2002, 08:21 AM

Quote:

What was the partition formatted with?

It wasnt, thats the problem, I'm just scared to use Linux fdisk cos I never used it before.

P.S. I'm not worried about windows overwriting the mbr, I have the bootdisks and I know how to get back into Linux and fix things.

Thanks again for the reply

Allen614 · 12-21-2002, 10:38 AM

I just noticed you have Mandrake. Put the first CD in,format the partition Fat32 and when it gets to packages reboot and swap the Mandrake for 98. Mandrake is just a graphical frontend for fdisk.

amp2000 · 12-21-2002, 01:24 PM

Good idea but I've just tried it and still no joy..
windows is still moaning saying it cant read clusters properly and and does a scan disk, it gets up to 26% and then says the clusters are bad, would you like to fix it, I say yes, I do this about 20 times and then realise it's probably going to ask me 'would you like to fix it' 300000 times as that's how many clusters were left

so I just booted back into linux.

If I could get a win98 bootdisk and then format it using M$ own fdisk I think it just might work, unless you have any other suggestions.

Thanks again for the replies

qanopus · 12-22-2002, 05:49 AM

I have a idea, go to "http://bootdisk.com/original.htm". You will see links to *.exe files there. You can run them via wine, or is that does not work, try unzip as these files are basically zip files. You will then have a image of a win 98 boot disk and you can use "dd" to create a boot disk.

amp2000 · 12-23-2002, 06:13 AM

Thanks for the reply schatoor but I managed to get it sorted with a win2k cd after wiping the 6.4 gig drive. Win2K was working fine yesterday but now it just keeps rebooting itself

So that's it, me and windows are finished for good!

Anyway, I have tried to make the switch over to the windows side but it's just too hard to install it

I guess I'll just stick to Linux, it's much easier

qanopus · 12-23-2002, 09:45 AM

He that's some thing you don't here every day!

riddlebox80 · 12-23-2002, 10:06 AM

I would go to bootdisk.com and download it