On "cannot install DOS" Richard Spencer said on Apr 28:
> 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.
This is a strange way to do it. Because dos and windows are
always changing the MBR. And partitions are better to set up with the
system's own fdisk. So it's better to make a fat partition with m$'s
fdisk and an ext2 one with Linux's fdisk. There are other software
packages for this. Like Partition Magic. Never got to test those -
fdisk is nice enough for me.
Anyway, after installing dos/win you will have to rerun lilo
to correct the MBR. A better way to do this (for the next time) will
be to make all partitions in windows/dos. Install dos/win. Start
your linux distribution and install Linux (delete that partition made
for linux in dos, and recreate it with linux's fdisk). This is the
fastest way. And the painless one.
> 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.
This means your floppy disk has problems. So the BIOS boots
up from A:. But there isn't a working system. Than it reads the hard
drive. This explains the LEDs working.
> 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.
Why in the world would you do that? Yea. It might seem a
nice feature - it's a "secret" feature.
First: have you created a _primary_ partition for dos to
reside? Second: is that partition in the bootable range (not sure if
that infamous 1k cylinder problem was solved or not)? If you answered
yes at both questions, than the command you want is sys c: and not
fdisk /mbr. Why did you want to do with fdisk /mbr?
> 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?)
Wow! You are mixing stuff up. If there is no working fat
partition, there is no need to even consider this part. At this point
I ask you if Lilo still works. Can you boot Linux?
> 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.
Uh... AFAIK that is useless. Maybe for some boot virus... but
weird. Because you can just rewrite the MBR with an util, and the
virus is deactivated.
So far I never had problems with making dual boot systems - m$
and Linux. Both installing dos after Linux or the other way around.
Initially there was no MBR problem. Now... I can't be that sure. You
made some strange moves.
That dd command you emploied, just clears up the boot of the
first primary partition on your first ide drive on your first ide
controller. That's all. The MBR resides on /dev/hda.
/dev/hda[1,2,3,4] and so on are just partitions. Now, please use this
piece of information as information. And make sure you won't use
this. Like in those movies "please don't try this at home". This
time you are somehow lucky. Because I understand the system was
fresh. Now you can just reinstall all your stuff. Later you might
lose valuable date. So please don't have any ideas like that. dd is
a very powerful util. And maybe the most damaging one. It is
relatively hard to use for newbies (probably a plus, because newbies
will avoid it). With dd you can directly write anything anywhere. At
first mistake you can lose everything. One small typo, or one wrong
assumption. That is all it takes.
You have to check if your floppy drive is working well. Than
if you have a good 1.44m disk (or 1.2m, but this is less probable).
You have to be sure that disk it bootable. You HAVE to make a
partition for dos from linux. m$ fdisk can't edit partitions very
well. This is a nice feature if you want things to be easy. It just
asks basic stuff, and it supplies the rest. As always, it supplies
data like everything but fat drive is discardable. As a safety
precaution, I would verify with Linux's fdisk if everything is
allright and if any partition is overlapping another.
That's it for now.
Raider
--
``Liberate tu-temet ex inferis''
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