Yeah, I can boot into text mode if I don't put the cd in.

What do you mean? Are you talking about booting into DOS, or about damn small linux (dsl) ?

What I was talking about was damn small linux in text mode (ie: no desktop, just a shell -- similar to dos)

To do that, you need to boot the cd, and at the "boot:" prompt (the very beginning) type:(I'm doing this along with you so I don't make any mistakes...)

I see what you're saying, I use a boot floppy, and if I don't have a cd in, it already goes into that shell, but I'll do what you're doing right now.

Once it has fully booted, you should see a prompt that looks like this:
At the prompt, type That will give you a nice print-out/menu of your partition table. Copy what it says about each partition and post it. Are the partitions what you think they should be?

EDIT: When I say "print-out", I mean printed to the computer screen. Sorry, computer-speak. I forget sometimes that not everyone knows.

Primary Free Space 4.13
hda1 Primary OS/2 hidden C: Drive 70.19
hda2 boot Primary FAT16 2146.96
hda5 Logical FAT16 1028.07
Pri/Log Free Space 4.13

I think I understand where you are going with this, but I'm not sure, so you're gonna have to tell me.

Yep, yep. Just thinking.

I wonder if the fact that it labeled your first partition (hda1) "C: Drive" is causing the problem. Strange that it would do that, since a partition with the OS/2 filesystem is obviously not going to be the C: drive.

I don't see an option for changing individual partition labels in cfdisk.

You could try booting hda2 directly with the smartboot manager, and perhaps windows will change the label if it recognizes the error. Otherwise, I'm not sure how one could change it, and it may not be important. It may matter more that the OS/2 partition is at the beginning of the drive.

Try the smartboot manager booting hda2.

If that doesn't work, then you could try two things. [list=1][*]You could try deleting everything with cfdisk and *then* running the restore disks -- if you are confident that the disks will restore everything.[*]You could try moving the boot partition to the front of the drive with parted, and then making a new OS/2 partition with cfdisk.[/list=1]

Or, if you don't care that much about windows, we could move on to the linux install.

Let's move onto the Linux Install

I noticed at the bottom, you can change the type of the Partition. Is this what we're going to do?

First off, for the install do you mind deleting all the current partitions, or is there something you want to keep on the computer?

At one point, I wanted to keep Windows 95...as a crutch for a newb...but since I restored it, there is nothing left for me on the computer, everything is deleted...so, I suppose that I don't have anything of worth on there...

Basically, yes. We will change the type of partition. We'll have to add a partition too.

Now this I can't do with you, so I will need good information...

First, using cfdisk, delete all the partitions on the drive.

Then, create a partition that uses all of the drive exept for 128MB. Make that partition's type "Linux" (83).

Then, fill up the end of the drive with a second partition of the type "Linux swap" (82).

Also, make the "Linux" partition bootable (another of the options down at the bottom).

Once that is done, tell cfdisk to save the changes by choosing the "Write" option at the bottom.

Then if it doesn't exit cfdisk use the "Quit" option to exit.

Finally, back at the root@tty1[/]# prompt, type the following to install dsl to the hard drive:
Let me know of any problems/questions.