The other thing the Dell sales rep told me is that Dell will not prepartition
the HDs on its machines, so I expect the machine I will order shortly will
come with one 4GB Win98 partition.
I realize there are tools for repartitioning without losing the data, but
they either aren't guaranteed or cost money I think. So I just assume
re-intall Win98 from scratch myself after repartitioning if I have no data of
my own to loser. It'll be good for the practice in case of a real HD failure.
This question is only peripherally Linux-related, but I've never quite
understood how one is supposed to re-install Win95/98 from scratch on a
completely wiped partition using the "for distribution only with new PCs"
Win95/98 CDs. Some friends of mine who just bought an Apple G3 Powerbook
repartitioned their drive to install MkLinux and they said the the re-install
of the MacOS took about 3 clicks. It was very easy.
It has always seemed much harder in the MS-Windows world. Someone pointed out
to me that this is partially intentional to prevent pirating of MS-Windows,
something which isn't really a big problem for Apple and its MacOS. And that
this is the reason for there being the special "only with new PCs" version.
But clearly one has to be able to do this with the computer for which that
copy of MS-Windows was purchased.
The problem I always run into is how to either boot from the CD (which most,
or all?) PCs can't do, or how to boot from a floppy in such a way as to
recognize the CD-ROM drive (or DVD-ROM acting as a CD-ROM). Can anyone tell
me how easy this is to do, either in general or with an Inspiron (3200 with
DVD-ROM)? What's the basic idea?
The only time I've ever successfully done this was on a SCSI desktop system,
and I had to install MS-DOS 6.22 and then a DOS SCSI driver (from an old
commercial SCSI package from Corel) in order to get access to the CD.
-Karl
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Karl Pfleger [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.stanford.edu/~kpfleger/
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