messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

[j arwood]

debiani386 wrote:
> 
> j arwood wrote:
>> Hey Folks,
>>
>> This is kinda off topic, but I'm not really all that familiar with DOS's 
>> fdisk or the mbr and thought someone her could lend a hand
>>
>> I have a client whose Windows ME crashed, so I thought we'd try her on 
>> Ubuntu. She's decided that she really doesn't want to screw with the 
>> learning curve, and wants to reinstall 98SE (the only install disk she 
>> has) then upgrade to XP (yeah I know, I know).
>>
>> I booted up her system using the 98 floppy, ran fdisk and deleted the 
>> non DOS partitions thinking that would get things rockin' for the 98 
>> setup cd. NOT!
>>
>> She has an 8 GB HDD and now fdisk is only showing 2 partitions:
>> 	Partition 1 as an Extended DOS partition 353 MB
>> 	Partition 2 as a Primary DOS partition 24 MB With a status of A (active 
>> I'm assuming)
>>
>> it Then goes on to say:
>> 	Total disk space is 8056 MB (which should be correct for a 8 GB drive)
>> 	The Extended DOS Partition contains Logical DOS Drives
>>
>> when I display the logical drive info I get:
>> 	No logical drives defined
>> 	Total Extended DOS partition size is 353 MB
>>
>> I then decided to try booting from an Ubuntu live cd to completely wipe 
>> the drive and try again. When the CD tries to boot, I get a grub error 22.
>>
>> Looks like there's some kind of bootloader (grub/mbr) issues at hand.
>>
>> Anyone able to help me out to help this lady out?
>>
>>   
> Heres what i have done before and it worked, however i wasnt able to 
> delete some of the linux partitions (they were small partitions though, 
> so i didnt sacrifice much hard drive space).
> First, in FDISK, i deleted the Extended DOS partition, but when i tried 
> that, it gave me an error stating that there was a logical drive, but 
> when i viewed the logical drive, i got the same response. So i got out 
> the boot floppy that came with my hard drive (it was a maxtor hdd..yah i 
> know i know, i didnt buy the hdd) and formatted it with there formatter. 
> It wipped most of the hard drive and added a FAT32.
> 
> If you would like, i could send you a copy of the floppy disk. It should 
> work on her hard drive, i tested it and ran it on other hard drives (my 
> other 2 ibm hdds)
> 
> --cj
> 
Please do send. I'll give it a try, and don't dis the maxtor too much. I 
have a 7200 rpm 30 gig that I've used in my old Power Mac 7500 for 
several years (headless backup server running YDL 3.0). I've never had a 
problem with it, yet I hope.

Thanks muchly

j