Hello all,

I have a brand new system, with a Transcend motherboard and AMD 1Ghz processor, plenty of RAM(128), and a Maxtor 40GB drive. I have been able to successfully load several flavors of Linux on this drive, but when it comes to booting to anything Dos or Windows related, it doesn't want to cooperate.

I'd like to load any version of windows on it, but it won't boot into dos. I'd also like to use it with Norton Ghost 2001, which also requires booting into dos.

Any ideas as to what I can do to get this thing to boot into dos? I have only been able to get it to display an echo command and then the floppy drive either quits reading all together or just hangs.

Any help is appreciated.

Kevin

Have you tried booting with a standard Win 9x boot disk? If not, give it a try and if you get to the prompt type FDISK /MBR to get rid of any LINUX remenats in you Master Boot Record. Norton Ghost uses a version of Partinfo.exe to poll the hard drive(s) during boot-up and the, by now, very non-standard Boot sector and Master Boot Record may be causing it to choke. If a standard boot disk won't boot, I don't know what to say, if a LINUX boot disk does work.

The Doofus,

Thanks for your reply...I can't even get a standard Win 98 disk to boot to the prompt. Is there a possibility that I could do something like this from a disk that will boot SYSLINUX and bring me to a prompt?

Is there a possibility that this could be related to a bad floppy drive?

Thanks,
Kevin

It is pretty amazing. I am wondering if maybe in your haste to find disks to boot LINUX with you dug out an old floppy with an infected boot sector and this virus is getting spread around amongst the floppys you are using. Try virus-scanning the floppy(s) you are using to boot with and see if that turns-up anything. A LINUX boot floppy wouldn't even notice a DOS boot sector virus and that could explain why they are booting, but the Windows boot disks aren't. It's the only thing I can think of that might account for why one type of boot disk will work, but another kind won't. If you discover an infection, clean the floppy or use a fresh one and make darn certain it is WRITE PROTECT any floppys you use in that machine. If you get a boot, download a Zero-fill utility for the Maxtor drive from their web site and use that to clean the drive so you can start fresh. Maxtor calls the utility a low-level formatter but, obviously, it isn't.

This sounds very much like a problem I created for myself a few months ago. I went something like this, after installing a second operation system on a computer that already had Win 98 running in FAT 32. After the installation of the second OS. The system would not boot, I mean it would not boot from any floppy, from the hard-drive, or from the bootloader program. After trying every boot disk I could lay my hands on I put in an old MSDOS 6.22 disk, and the #$*@ system came to life with. In my haste to install the second OS on the primary master drive I forgot to realize that most OS do not want to deal with too many primary partitions on the same hard drive. In my case I was able to use another computer and create a disk that contained Partition Magic on a MSDOS 6.22 system disk. I used the disk to hide one of the partitions and the computer started normally after that point.

I've had a similar problem, call it problem 3 (don't mean to add on to yours but it's similar). Athlon 500mhz, Win 98se original OS, installed mandrake linux 2 months ago fine. Ran it for 2 months, when one day i find it won't boot to anything. It gives me the original IBM Aptiva logo screen like it always did when it first turns on, but then it gives me a screen reading Li at the top but nothing else. I tried the Linux boot disk I made but to no avail. I am concerned w/ my Win partition and files there. I'll try a Windows boot disk. If that doesn't work what are my options?

Problem 3 has changed...The software recovery cd worked, giving me IBM Recovery 2.0. What do I do from here; I have access to a dos prompt, but cannot enter the C directory; I have access to all hardware info and diags; I have an option to custom recover any files to their original; ga! what now...