Help! I think I killed my primary Win98 HD while installing RedHat6.2 on my secondary!

[Kango]

Hi there.. Today I (regrettably) decided that I would take the plunge and join the club of people who have dual-boot Windows/Linux system configurations.

At first, I thought I would make a linux partition at the end of my primary HD (13.6gig IBM Deskstar, 7200rpm, ATA/66), but the fact that your root mount partition has to be before HD cylinder 1024 quickly put an end to that idea, as the first free cylinder I had was in the 1500s.

So, rather than give up my linux quest, I decided to take an old 1.2 gig Seagate from my dead Pentium90 system, add it as a secondary HD on my system, and install Linux on that.

I added the new HD, booted up, formatted the new drive and then ran the Redhat 6.2 installer. I added a Linux-Native partition and a Linux Swap partition to the new HD, and made sure not to touch any settings for my primary HD.

Linux installed OK, and I started playing around in it for a few hours. I installed a few programs, rebooted back into linux a few times.. no big deal. Then I decided that I'd boot back into Win98 and call it a night.

So, I rebooted the system and at the "LILO: " line, I typed "dos" to load from Windows. The loading screen that comes up when Windows loads appeared, and my HD started ticking as usual... but after about 20 seconds my computer REBOOTED ITSELF, before making it into windows. I tried again and again, but the system always reboots itself before getting into windows. Then I tried safemode. Safemode loads up fine, but 5 seconds after loading up it freezes. A hard "the lock-lights go out in my keyboard" freeze. I tried a few more times, with the same results.

Then I thought that I would disconnect the new linux HD altogether, and just load as normal from my primary HD. That didn't work either. After POSTing, I was expecting it to say "Loading Windows 98..." and for the loading screen to come up, but instead, the screen begins scrolling with constant ones and zeroes (1010101010101010101010101010101 covering the entire screen). I tried AGAIN with the same result. Then I reconnected the new linux HD and tried to load windows again. No luck. So I booted into linux (which runs absolutely FINE) and decided to write this note!

What the hell should I do? How should I proceed? If I have to end up reformatting my primary HD, is there any way to get important files off of it? I'm really upset right now.

Thanks,

Kango

System Config:

Athlon 500@650mhz
128 megs Micron PC100
Gigabyte GA7IX mobo
Antec 303x 300w Power Supply
Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI (Geforce DDR)
Diamond MX300
3com NIC
Pioneer 10x DVD-ROM
HP 4x4x32 CD-RW

and, of course

13.2 gig IBM Deskstar
1.2 gig Seagate

 

[Kango]

oh, because someone said it might be important, this is what is inside my lilo.conf file:

boot=/dev/hda

map=/boot/map
install=/boot/boot.b
prompt
timeout=50
linear
default=linux

image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14-5.0
label=linux
read-only
root=/dev/hdb5

other=/dev/hda1
label=dos

the end.

 

[Klosters]

This might work. Make sure that you have a Linux boot floppy that WORKS. Sometimes creating one using the "easy" method doesn't work. This always does: As root, put a fresh floppy into your fd0 Drive(A: drive).

From the "naked" CLI, type: "dd if=/boot/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0 bs=8192," no quotation marks, and hit "Enter." Next, boot to the C:\ prompt with a Win98 rescue floppy. Type "fdisk /mbr" and hit "Enter." In a moment, LILO will be removed from your C:\ drive's Master Boot Record.

You'll be able to boot into Win no problem, but you'll need the Linux boot floppy to boot into Linux. After that it's up to you. Personally, I don't install Linux using a GUI-based Partition Program. You might select "fdisk" instead of the "easy GUI" method if that choice is still an option near the start of RH's installation process. Of course that may no longer be an option. I keep an old version of Mandrake around so that using Linux's version of fdisk is easy. Linux's fdisk prog rocks. I use it on drives that will only host Win9x. Window's fdisk is a pos.