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

[Eric Nelson]

On Monday 14 January 2002 11:02 am, you 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?

It sounds like you need to reformat the windows partition.  Do you have a 
boot floppy for linux?  A nice partitioning program is parted.  You can load 
the image to a floppy, and do partitioning things.   You either need to use 
grub, or lilo, or boot from a floppy.  Kernel panic means it cant load the OS.

http://www.suse.de/en/support/howto/parted/
>
> Hopefully some of you dual-booters out there may have run across this
> before.
>
> Any help is appreciated,
>
> Thanks, JOEY.
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