Well ... I'm no guru, just a guy who happens to know some answers to some
common Linux questions and has some free time to write answers ... but
anyway ...
Your problem isn't a Linux problem, at least not the basic problem you
describe: you cannot boot reliably from your floppy drive. If you could, you
would be able to boot into MSDOS using an MSDOS boot disk. DOS doesn't
require a hard disk to run, so if you are really booting from floppy, your
attempts to fiddle with the MBR should be irrelevant (unless your BIOS boot
sequence is C:,A:, and zero'ing the MBR causes the BIOS to skip past C:).
It's hard to say what the cause is based on what you've described ... bad
disk? bad drive? unusual laptop that can't boot from its floppy drive? BIOS
setting error? Are you sure you can boot a Linux boot/rescue disk from the
floppy drive?
Once you solve the floppy problem, I'd suggest looking at the Linux_Win95
mini-HowTo (at http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Linux+Win95.html) for the
details of how to do the dual-OS install. Win98 is basically the same as
Win95. WinNT is quite different (there's a different mini-HowTo for it), and
I'm told that Win2000 is NT-like in its boot properties.
I'm sorry to be of less help than you probably hoped for. This sounds like a
hardware problem or, perhaps, simply bad DOS disks.
At 04:50 PM 4/28/00 -0300, Richard Spencer wrote:
>This must seem like a misdirected plea.
>
>I would appreciate any help you gurus out there
>can muster.
>
>I recently installed Linux on my laptop. I bought
>a new, larger drive and managed to install Red Hat
>without a hitch. I have got most of what I had had
>before, and it didn't take that much time.
>
>By installing a larger drive, I had planned to add
>Windows -- and promised my wife to do so -- so
>that she would be able to access MS Office stuff.
>
>Only I can't seem to be able to install Dos or
>Windows. Every time I boot with a Dos bootable
>diskette in the floppy drive, I either get an
>error message, missing operating system, or
>nothing happens (the floppy drive makes noise, the
>hard drive indicates activity, and then nada.
>
>When I was able to get a A:\ prompt, I ran
>Dos FDISK to create a primary partition,
>and typed in FDISK /MBR, but I wasn't able
>to get the A:\ prompt again.
>
>I created a Linux boot diskette and boot from a
>floppy, but I must've damaged the part of the
>hard disk that allows Dos to get it's initial
>instructions (the MBR?)
>
>When I did get the Dos prompt, it was after
>issuing the Linux command:
>dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1
>which I read would help to 'reset' the
>MBR, or something like that.
>
>I would appreciate any help in finding out
>how to proceed. I've read/glanced through
>BootPrompt-HOWTO, Bootdisk-HOWTO, MultiOS-HOWTO,
>>From DOS/Windows to Linux HOWTO, and read through
>the relevant sections of
>Welsh&Kaufman's Running Linux, 2nd ed.
>(O'Reilly) and Kofler's Linux: Installation,
>Configuration & Use, but I'll be darned if I
>can't seem to figure this one out!
>
>I challege Lawson, Ray and you other gurus
>(you know who you are!) to help me solve this :-)
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------------------------------------------------
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
