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Topic: Cannot Recover Wiondows 98 Bootup, Unable to reboot into windows 98

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linux4all

Group: Members
Posts: 13
Joined: April 2006

Posted: May 28 2006,19:17

I wanted to do a frugal install of DSL-N on my Gateway Laptop. I chose LILO frugal install from the tools menu, and my installation went fine to some extent, but now I want to re-boot into my old Windows 98 system, and don't have a clue as to how to do so. Every previous installation of Linux I have tried has given me options at startup to boot into either the old operating system, or the newly loaded Linux system, but DSL does not give this option, so I would like to know how to recover into my old operating system. Here is what my Drive looks like:
One Hard Drive, divided up as follows:
hda1 - Primary Partition, FAT16, containing Windows 98 operating system.
hda2 - secondary partition, divided into the following:
hda5 - FAT32 partition for data storage
hda6 - FAT16 partition for windows swap
hda7 - Linux swap partition
hda8 - Linux ext2 partition, containing the DSL Image, /mydsl, and backup for DSL

What do I have to do to recover my old boot record so I can boot again into windows 98?

There just doesn't seem to be ANY information about what DSL does to the boot record. If I had known that this was going to happen, I would never have attempted a frugal install.

andrewb

Group: Members
Posts: 316
Joined: July 2005

Posted: May 28 2006,23:58

Press the TAB key when the 'boot:' prompt appears & you should get a list of boot options. Assuming you told the setup you had windows on the drive it should have set up a boot option to load windows. Once you know what the option is called type that name at the 'boot:' prompt & you should get into your windows installation.

If that doesn't work you will need to edit /etc/lilo.conf to add a section to boot into windows.

Personally I would install Grub. After using Lilo for many years, grub is much more user friendly, especially when you want to change operating systems as you are doing. Grub is in the myDSL repositry under the System section.

linux4all

Group: Members
Posts: 13
Joined: April 2006

Posted: May 29 2006,01:00

Quote (andrewb @ May 28 2006,19:58)

Press the TAB key when the 'boot:' prompt appears & you should get a list of boot options.

After installation on the hard drive, I don't get a boot prompt any more. What's more, I was not even given a choice for multiple OSes in the frugal install script.
I guess at this point, I'm trying to find out how to recover what was written over by the lilo loader. I have tried just about everything to get back to my Win98 installation, including the following
1 Run windows fdisk, and select Drive C as the active drive.
2. Run powerquest bootmagic and tried booting from the primary dos partition (C:)
3. Erased and re-formatted the Linux partition /dev/hda8
4. Googled LILO, and found lilo.conf file. Tried to edit it as root, but could not, because it says it's on a non-writeable media.

I guess I should have tried shoving a different hard drive into my laptop before experimenting. I thought I was covered, because I have used Norton Ghost to backup my entire Windows partition, but even after restoring the partition, I cannot boot into windows. There must be some documentation somewhere on how to move a windows boot sector back to a hard drive. I just can't seem to find it.

linux4all

Group: Members
Posts: 13
Joined: April 2006

Posted: May 29 2006,02:08

For anyone who happens to be interested, I seem to have found a solution to my problem (recovering win98 after a frugal lilo install of DSL-N)
What I did was a round-about way of getting back my old boot sector. You may recall that I had saved an image of my windows 98 partition with norton ghost, but reloading that partition did not recover the boot sector. My final solution was to re-format Drive C, which had originally contained windows98. Then I did a clean install of windows 98, installing the minimal stuff from the original CD. After that, I could re-boot into windows, so then I used norton ghost to restore my system from the backup ghost file I had originally created.

I don't particularly like the way I did it, but at least I now have the same windosw system that I had before messing things up with the frugal Lilo install. From now on, I'm going to be satisfied to boot my DSL from CD, and simply keep my backups and /mydsl stuff on a linux partition of my hard drive.

3 replies since May 28 2006,19:17

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