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

[R. Douglas Barbieri]

keywords: Windows 98, Win98, boot, boot partition, grub, lilo, fdisk

Hi Joey,

Well, the only thing I can think of is that perhaps the Win98 setup 
program is not overwriting the boot sector of your master harddrive. If 
you boot up using the Win98 CD, you can opt to boot your system into a 
command line mode. From there, using the fdisk utility:

fdisk /mbr

That will overwrite the master boot sector and hopefully elimiate all 
traces of Grub. I've have this happen with LILO, anyway, and used the 
fdisk command to get rid of it.

Hope this helps!

On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Joey Karalius wrote:

> 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.
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-- 
R. Douglas Barbieri
doug@dooglio.net
www.dooglio.net