question about formatting..

[Guest]

I have 2 hdds (a 6gig Western Dig and a 20gig Maxtor).

I have 4 partitions C:, E:, and F: are partitions on the western digital, and D: is the Maxtor partition..

C:\ of course has windows98 on it, and I did a clean install of win2k on D:\

My question is: can I format my entire Western Digital (6gig, C:\, E:\, and F:\) hdd and still be able to boot into Win2k? I would like to fully format the 6gig and then reinstall Win98 or Me onto it w/o the partitions/fragmentation...Any problems I might encounter with formatting the Win98 partition?

Sorry my post is a bit jumbled, hoep it makes some sort of sense =P

~Chris

ps - one more question: i'm plannign on installing RedHat 7 soon...should it have a separate partition? if so, how large?

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by TenTen321 on 11/23/00 08:56 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

no, unfortunantly. There are 3 files on c: that are critical to the win2k boot process.

Boot.ini, Ntdetect.com and Ntldr
Also copy Bootsect.dos - it's not needed to load win2k but it might make things easier later.

The boot sector on c: drive is also important. It contains the code to load your boot menu, rather than just starting win 98.

If you format a floppy disk in win2k, and then load the 3 files above onto it, you should be able to start win2k from it. Try this out before you wipe your 6 gig drive.

Once you've repartitioned the drive, format it in win2k(make sure you select fat32 and not ntfs) this should restore the boot sector. If you then replace the above 3 files win2k should be able to boot without the floppy.

Your going to run into problems when you reinstall win98 because the setup procedure will overwrite the bootsector and your boot menu will disappear - it'll just load win98. The floppy disk will still work though.

If you know how to use a sector disk editor(such as diskedit in the norton utilities package) then save the bootsector on drive c before you install win98, and restore it after. If not, I'll find out if there's an easy way to restore it with win2k, or write a debug script to do it.

 

[Guest]

You may also wind up with problems with drive letter changing - that can screw all kinds of stuff up. If you want to do it, flatten the whole lot and start again

===
Do unto others before they do unto you...

 

[Guest]

Well he is reinstalling win98, so it won't have this problem. And in win2k drive letters can be changed easily. Win2k also boots by partition number - so in this case it's looking for partition1 on drive 2, not d: