need help fixing Win98 boot problem (MBR)

[jlv]

I have good-old Win98 system that has been working so well that I've held off upgrading to WinXP. I want it to keep working well (because I'm really going to buy a new mobo+cpu in a few months for the XP system).

But, I just managed to break Win98 from booting.

What I was doing when I broke it was backing up data to CD. That all went ok. But then I remembered that I had some unpartitioned space on the main ("C") drive. So, I fired up fdisk and started creating an Extended DOS partition. While it was say "Verifying disk integretity" I thought "Lets not do this now", so I killed fdisk.

That was my mistake.

All went fine, but then I needed to reboot. When I did, Windows didn't boot. I am assuming that I did something with fdisk.

Now, this drive has both FreeBSD (and it's boot selector, "booteasy") and Win98. I never really boot FreeBSD anymore there. The BIOS loads booteasy and it gives me a prompt like this:

F1 DOS
F2 FreeBSD

If I select "F1", instead of seeing Windows start, it displays a line of about 30 blue spaces and then locks up.

What I've done since this happened is booted to FreeBSD, and verified that the partition tables are ok. I've checked out the FAT32 filesystem, and it looks ok. I booted up a Win98 setup disk and I can look at my old "C" drive just fine.

I went as far as replacing booteasy with a standard MBR (via Win98 DOS with "fdisk /mbr"). All this does is show the line of blue spaces immediately.

I just can't boot it. I'm guessing that I've pooch'd the 2nd-level boot block from Windows; that being the thing that is loaded by the MBR. I don't know that is on Windows (I do know what it is on FreeBSD or Linux, but that doesn't help me here).

Ideally, I'd like just to repair the boot so I can keep this particular system going.

Any suggestions? Hints? Points to "how windows boots"?

 

[Tiger]

I was going to suggest fdisk /mbr but you've obviuosly tried that.
How about scandisk from the Winders boot floppy to see what happens?

 

[jlv]

I ran the scandisk from the Win98 Setup disk; it was fine. I can see everything under "C:" just fine (either from the setup disk or from FreeBSD).

 

[bacillus]

don't fully understand the problem but since fdisk /mbr didn't help then suggest you also try sys C: command from the
A: prompt when booting up with the win98 startup floppy!

 

[lowtech1]

It sound like you have bad or over write the hdd first sector with FDISK.

Backup all of your important files if you can boot & see the C: prompt with a boot disk.

Then try booting the system using a Linux boot disk with Linux FDISK, DiskDruid, PartiontionManager, or Partition Commander to recreate your partitions, and reinstall the OSes.

Partition Commander Demo: "You can create, format, delete, hide/unhide, mount/unmount, view sectors (read/write access to any sector)" with this demo version.

Good luck!

 

[jlv]

Replacing c:\io.sys with one from a clean Win98 install got it "fixed" enough that I was able to get to the Win98 startup menu. io.sys is aka winboot.sys, and both are referenced by the boot block at the front of a bootable FAT partition.

I can select the "boot into DOS" from the boot menu, but I still haven't gotten Windows runnign. If I do a logged step-by-step boot, it hangs loading ndis.vxd (IIRK).

Since I've already wasted two days on this, I'm going to give up ressurecting the old system directly. Right now, I'm trying to decide on whether to do:

1. an upgrade installation of Win98 (probably SE) over the broken Win98. I think this has a high chance of working (now that I can get things going), and it will mean I don't need to reinstall all my apps and stuff.

It will mean I'll have to update all of the Windows components again, but thankfully I've saved all of the important hotfixes and upgrades (IE5.5sp2, etc) on CDROM.

And, I've made an image copy of the disk, so I can't destroy my data no matter what I do.

2. a clean installation of either Win98SE or WinXP-Pro. (this is also my game system, so WinME and Win2K are out). I know that if I go this path, I'll have to reinstall everything, but I also am 100% confident that this will work - and the result will be better

My only qualm about XP is that I'm worried about how many things I have that won't work anymore. Things like drivers for older USB gamepads, or software like ATM (for PostScript fonts).