Very Computer

Hi,

I'm by now rather clueless about a problem with a friends computer.
The machine has a number of partitions on the main disk:

1. OS/2 Boot manager
2. DOS-16, 200 MB
3. DOS-16, 500 MB
4. Linux ext2, 250MB
5. Linux swap, 300 MB

The 3rd partition was created by removing an old HPFS partition and a
small DOS partition, and creating one new partition. Next I installed
Win95 on the 2nd partition (after removing Win311). So far so good.
When the Windows install was finished, everything worked fine, I could
boot Linux and Win95 without problems.

Then I made the mistake of installing the wrong sounddrivers in Win95:
the machine hanged, and after rebooting, Win95 would hang just after
displaying the startup-screen. So I tried a MS-DOS boot disk I still
had lying around. Same result: it hanged during the boot sequence, just
after accessing the disk (and another disk BTW). So I tried booting
Linux from floopy (the boot manager had been disabled). No problem.

When I checked the partitions however, there was some major corruption
(esp with the 4rd partition). I figured that these corrupt tables
caused MSDOS/Win95 to crash when they checled the drives for valid
DOS partitions. I then tried to boot from a DR (Novell) DOS 7 disk -
which succeeded. All DOS partitions where ok, and I then used
Norton Utilities to restore the partition tables (which took some
time, as the partitions were created as a chain of extended partitions...)
Now the 'verify' of Linux fdisk no longer reports any problem with
the partitions.

HOWEVER, MS-DOS and Windows 95 still won't boot... Before formatting
the disks completely and starting afresh, I trying here to get
some fresh ideas about what might be wrong here...

As a sidenote: the 3rd partition, still empty, "disappeared" once
before installing Windows, but after formatting it again later,
it seemed ok again.

Thanks in advance,

        Herman

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Herman Kuiper - research engineer - National Aerospace Lab NLR, Amsterdam

WWW   : http://huizen.dds.nl/~kuiperh              +31-20-617 1885 (home)

Herman,

I'm not sure I understand how you have that set up. You're talking about
extended/logical partitions, but DOS/Windows has to boot from an active,
primary partition.

Are you using the boot manager at all?

Assuming DOS/Windows is on the active primary, you could try a sys c:
command from the boot floppy to restore the boot files. That should at
least get you to DOS prompt.

You could also download the partinfo program from this web site:

http://www.powerquest.com/downlwd/index.html

It's about a 128k file. Run it from a DOS prompt and send the output to
a text file:

partinfo > partinfo.txt

It may give some helpful information on your partitions - like error
messages, warnings, and so forth. Post the contents here if you need
some more help.

Tom

: I'm not sure I understand how you have that set up. You're talking about
: extended/logical partitions, but DOS/Windows has to boot from an active,
: primary partition.

Ah, I left that out... The partition containing DOS/Windows is indeed
on a primary partition. The second DOS partition is a logical one, as are the
Linux partitions.

: Are you using the boot manager at all?

Nope - Windows 95 wouldn't install with it active, so I disabled that.

: Assuming DOS/Windows is on the active primary, you could try a sys c:
: command from the boot floppy to restore the boot files. That should at
: least get you to DOS prompt.

But that's the funny part: *only* DR-DOS will boot, MS-DOS will not (neither
from floppy nor from harddisk). But when I boot DR-DOS, *all* DOS partitions
are OK. Doing a sys c: won't work if MS-DOS won't boot from the floppy...
And doing a sys c: from a DR-DOS floppy to an MS-DOS installation doesn't
sound good...

: It may give some helpful information on your partitions - like error
: messages, warnings, and so forth. Post the contents here if you need
: some more help.

I'll certainly try it :-) There must some sort of check MS-DOS is trying
to do on the partitions/whatever, which results in a crash with them, but
not with DR-DOS, Linux and OS/2. If all else fails, I'll try removing
all partitions (zeroing them out) and installing everything again, but
the irritating part is that all data on the disk is OK...

        Herman
--

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Herman Kuiper - research engineer - National Aerospace Lab NLR, Amsterdam

WWW   : http://huizen.dds.nl/~kuiperh              +31-20-617 1885 (home)