Unable to access Win 98 or C Drive
 

I recently installed Fedora Core from CD which worked fine (or so I thought) so I can now access Fedora, everything else works fine apart from the fact that Windows has dissappeared completely.

My PC came with an emergency boot disk which should then re-install Windows over the top of whatever is on the HDD so I tried this. It won't work as the C drive does not exist any more.

I have a feeling I was rather to hasty during the Fedora install and managed to overwrite the C drive. Before I started the install I partioned my 6.4gb HDD into C and D with enough room for Fedora onto the D Drive.

So at the moment I can access Fedora which is excellent apart from a complete lack of sound, but that is a soundcard issue which I can fix. I think I need to somehow recreate the C drive so the Win bootdisk allows me to re-install Win 98. Then I can put Fedora back on correctly.

Any suggestions/help would be most gratefully received and appreciated.

Thanks.

Ben

what's the output of
fdisk /dev/hda -l

Linux will usually use more than one partition - at a guess you have probably removed all partitions from your system. You can see what partitions are on your system by running:
fdisk -l

Within fedora. My best suggestion, if this is the case, is to compltely repartition your system completely and reinstall both OSs.

I assume I need a command prompt to run fdisk, how do I do it.

Sorry, very new to all this!!

Thanks.

Just open up a console application like xterm, gnome-terminal or konsole.

fdisk -l

Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/hda1 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 14 727 5735205 83 Linux
/dev/hda3 728 784 457852+ 82 Linux swap

I take it's bad news!!

Cheers.

Ben

Yes - you have completely removed your windows partiion.

I suggest you delete everything, add a partition using half the disk for windows and install it. Then install Fedora. When it asks about partitions just choose to install it on the free space.

Thanks for the advice, I know what to do during the installation next time!!

Cheers.

Ben

I suggest avoiding dual-booting since it offers few benefits. It made sense when hard disks were expensive.
What I do instead is use inexpensive (10-15 bux each) IDE hard drive swap racks (check pricewatch.com) and keep my various Windows and Linux installations seperate.
I leave the power switch on, but remove the tray lock pin. That lets me just power down, swap drives, and reboot. It works great, and even if I didn't use Linux I'd still run removable hard drives.
Removable media=convenience.

Why not just have 2 drives permenantly in the system? Then it is even cheaper.

That works too, but requires either a hard disk selector switch (to choose which is Master and Slave), or various bootloaders which are easily corrupted.
Smart Boot Manager is a very handy system-agnostic way to do this, since it just "sees" hardware.
Makes a great boot floppy for your toolkit too, and the image will run from CD.
Smart Boot Manager

"Sending keystrokes to the operating system
Smart BootManager can preload some keystrokes into the key buffer before booting an operating system to control its booting process. For example, you can send Shift-F5 to Windows 98 to let it go into the real DOS mode."

Interesting features. Nice link farmall.