i recently bought a 2.4 Ghz with a 30 GB HD 256 RaM for 300 $

i bought it specifically for battlefield, since it was only 300 $ it did'nt come with an OS, this was no big deal since i had freinds with windows.

the first thing i wanted to do once i got this thing home was get it running, closest at hand were Linux Mandrake CD's. So the first thing i did was install Mandrake. Turns out the first cd, was scratched and the installation only finsished half way through.

Long story short, i bought this PC for BattleField 1942, i'd heard great things about Linux and was anxious to learn it, but right now i'm stuck with NO os at all. i start up in the BIOS, and try to start up from a windows 98 SE floppy, or cd (niether work), it goes directly to a screen that says

"linux-secure
linux
linux-nonfb
linux-smp
old_linux
old_linux-secure
failsafe"

how do i get rid of this ? i know it must have somehow dug it's way into my BIOS, because it refuses to let me start up on a windows boot disk, and i formatted the hell outta the drive. there is NO way Linux (the incomplete linux, if it was complete i'd more than welcome it to stay there) could have survived and would still be there. so i am desperately requesting

Please help me get this menu OFF my PC so i can get win 98 on it, i wanna play battlefield !

You'll have to go into your BIOS and set the floppy drive as the 1st boot device if you want to boot from the Win98 floppy - Linux can't stop you from changing the boot order in your BIOS.

The relevant order here is;

BIOS first
Bootloader 2nd
OS third

Hi there,

Firstly I have never heard of any operating system touching the BIOS in any way.

Most likely you have a small (couple of meg) boot partition created on your harddisk by Linux.

Check the boot order in your bios setting. It probably has the hard disk set before the floppy and that is why your windows boot disk is not working (it finds the little linux boot partition on the hard disk first).

If this does not work try unpluging the hard disk and then booting off the Windows 98 boot disk.

Hope this helps

Paul

yes, like mentioned above, you should check your BIOS to see if the BOOT drive is your CD-ROM, so that you can boot Win98.

I suggest you first install Windows and then Linux, it will be the easiest and most convenient way of doing it. This way you will be able to gather all the pertinent information that you need to do the installation under Linux.

Get all your hardware info, drivers, cards, etc...

let us know how it goes.

Yup, boot order should be:

Floppy Drive
CD Drive
Network Boot
Hard Disk

Hard disk should always be last, allowing you to fix shit easily with a boot disk of some sort

Once the bios checks other boot mediums, the Windows install disk should boot just fine.

Now, get ready to dual boot between Windos and Linux -- and when you tire of Winfows Crashing, asking for reboots, and upgrading drivers, go ahead and get rid of the windows partition

-Shade

You do know you cant play battlefield under Linux right?

You cant?