Topic: To DOS - Hardrive appears trashed!

[Wildpuss]

Background - I am just a home user with a thing for Linux and computer music.

I have a couple of machines, and the little one: AMD K6233, 64Meg, 2.1Gig Quantum, TX mobo, was a good candidate to become an e-smith "personal server".

Anyhow, after installing and checking out e-smith for a while, (and loving it!!) I decided to embark on a little project to get the machine to dual-boot between e-smith and a small win98 installation just to run some music-creation software I like to use.
(I might write more on this project some other time.)

From a boot-floppy I used linux fdisk to scrub the disk of partitions entirely.

I then booted up with the win98 installation floppy to create the DOS partitions. After asking if I wanted "Large disk support" the DOS fdisk just crashed.

I suppose this is either a bug in DOS fdisk or Linux fdisk has a different idea about writing DOS disk records.

BTW Linux fdisk, cfdisk, and parted all will still work fine.

Has anyone heard of this before, and is there a fix or a work around for it?

I had heard that win98 can be troublesome if you try to install it on partitions made by the Linux fdisk. Has anyone done this?


Thankyou for your patience with my rather tedious question.

[Des Dougan]

There are differences in the two versions of fdisk. However, even if you resolve them, e-smith will, by default, blow away all other partitions on the disk. There are threads you can search for on creating a custom kickstart config file.


Des Dougan

[Wildpuss]

Thank you very much Des, I wish I had this information earlier. Hehe.

The install method I ended up developing involved using parted and partimage, incorporating the /boot partition back into /, shrinking it, re-running lilo, etc. and saving and restoring the partition image. It acually went totally smoothly. Partimage is excellent, graphical and fits on half a floppy!

Changing the script as Bart suggests is obviously easier, I suppose on the upside I can now revert to a clean install in about 12 minutes!

I'm still curious about the fdisk issue though.