[vox-tech] Problems with dual boot system (Win 98/RH 7.2)

[Joey Karalius]

OK, here's what I did.

My Windows 98SE crashed to the point where I couldn't do an emergency
backup of important files or even run win98 setup to restore the
corrupted system files.  So I repartitioned and formatted my slave drive
which had RedHat 7.2 on it (I was running a dual boot) to an extended
DOS partition so I could backup Windows files to it (just some bookmark
files, Word documents, family photos, etc).  Linux was actually unstable
at this point as well (kernel panic?), but I have backups of everything.

I'm trying to rebuild my system from scratch now, but traces of grub
seem to be lingering around, even after I formatted my master hard drive
(the slave was also formatted as an extended DOS partition and contains
only my backup files).  When I try to reinstall Win 98 (I've run setup
from both windows and MS-DOS), I get numerous errors regarding system
files, but I also get one that reads something like 'boot virus!' when I
run setup for windows.  I went into the BIOS and turned off the boot
virus protection so that setup would run, but I still get tons of system
errors (.vxd, .dll, and stack errors).  I've run Scandisk a number of
times with no errors as far as the hard drive goes, but various files
turn up missing or directory structure is screwed up somehow.

Windows is now barely functional, extremely unstable, the boot virus
protection is still disabled, I can barely run Netscape in order to
write this e-mail, and I'm at a loss for what happened.

I'm most likely overlooking something obvious, but...
How do I eliminate all traces of grub so I can start from scratch?
Was there an uninstall program for Linux that I missed?
What is kernel panic? I heard it mentioned on the list recently...
How can I load Linux so that it runs completely separate from Windows,
(ie. no bootloader, stability of one doesn't affect the other, etc.)?
Is this even the real problem?

Hopefully some of you dual-booters out there may have run across this
before.

Any help is appreciated,

Thanks, JOEY.