response 179 of 257:

Oct 26 06:06 UTC 1999

Well here is my situation now.  I do have a boot floppy I made during the Linux
installation when I run it I get the following:

Lilo

Press return (or wait 10 seconds) to boot your Linux Mandrake system from
/dev/hdc5  If you want to use a rescue disc type rescue now.

boot:
Loading Linux.... (it gets through putting 4 dots on the screen) then
Error 0 x 10

I also managed to make a resue disc that seems to boot me into a stripped
down Linux with emacs and a few other applications.  The recue disc is called
something like Tom's root boot.  What should I do from here to get it to
boot from a floppy to /dev/hdc5?  If the next thing doesn't work Im going
to reclaim the hd space for windows.  How does one reformat a Linux drive
to fat16 anyway?  Thanks for all your time and paitence with a Linux
newbie.

response 181 of 257:

Oct 26 22:58 UTC 1999

Where'd you get 'Tom's root/boot'?  I've seen that one recommended, but when
I went to look for it the other day, I didn't know where to look.

response 183 of 257:

Oct 27 07:35 UTC 1999

re 180 I don't think this  root boot stops except in the very begging for
anything.  It's all on one floppy so I know it dpesn't ask for another disk.
Is there anyway to put lilo and whatever else I need to boot on floppies?
I don't want to go through wiping out my win98 mbr again.  Thanks to everyone
for paitnece with a Linux newbie. Or could I put lilo on e: and switch to that
drive with the bios when I boot up?  If so, how?

response 185 of 257:

Oct 28 02:20 UTC 1999

Slackware used to have a 'create boot floppy' option during installation. 
Don't know if it still does.

response 187 of 257:

Oct 28 16:09 UTC 1999

        Sounds like you are in the position I was a few years ago, due
        to that goddamned 95..

        At this point, yer pretty well fubar. You could *TRY* to run
        the Mandrake (semi-RH) installation again: it should give you
        access to fdisk and/or Disk Druid. And, you should be able THEN
        to muck around with the "linux partition" - if you USED one.

        For me, it was just all around less hassle to NOT fight the RH
        install and just reinstall over the old install - AND MAKE A BOOT
        DISK THIS TIME. I emphasize this because, that boot disk will be
        aware of all the partitioning, and get you into the MAIN, HDD 
        SYSTEM. Once *there* you can _always_ so "lilo<cr>" and insure
        the MBR is reset.

        (man, we *really* need an anti-terrorist tool to combat this
        win95/mbr-battle) 

response 189 of 257:

Oct 28 20:29 UTC 1999

        bwahahahahahahahaha!

        You want to blame LINUX because:

        1) you didn't create systems disk;
        2) winfuck95 ignores other OS???

        Man, yer better off stickin' to the winblows stuff.

response 191 of 257:

Oct 28 22:39 UTC 1999

re #189 Look asshole if you would actually read my responses I did create
a boot disk and a rescue disk and they didn't work.  If all Linux users
were like you no noe would try Linux, it's a good thing I know most Linux
users aren't like you.

re #190 Yes i can change which disk boots the system in fact I have it
set now now to check for a then c.  I'm a little hesitent to reinstall
Linux until I know a way I can do it without destroying the Win98 mbr.
That's why i was thinking of trying the install with the IDE cables removed
from the windows drives.  I'm just not sure if the drive letters will
be reassigned once the cables are hooked up and if this will confuse the bios
for booting the system.

response 193 of 257:

Oct 29 01:16 UTC 1999

The bios doesn't know about A,C, etc.  It does know about disk drives
0,1, etc (the floppy drives), and about drives 80h, 81h, etc (the hard
drives).  If the setup menu talks about A,C,etc., this is a polite
fiction, not reality.

So far as pulling IDE cables goes -- it depends a bit on how you have
things setup, and a bit on your hardware.  You probably have 2 IDE
connectors (primary and secondary), each of which can connect to up to 2
drives (cd-rom, hard disk, etc.) On each IDE connector, you can have a
master, or you can have a master and a slave.  You can't have a slave
without a master (but some drives, particularly cd-rom drives, may
figure out there's no master and "become" the master.)  Hard disks
usually have one or more jumpers that can be used to select
master/slave.  Now, one thing I unfortunately don't know is how dual IDE
bus systems assign drive numbers in the bios.  On the older single-IDE
bus systems, it was very simple; the master was 80h, and if the slave
existed, it was 81h.  I would expect a dual IDE machine to just assign
them 80h,81h,82h,83h regardless of whether they exist or not, but it's
quite possible something else happens.

Now, if the bios talks about A,C., etc., it's lying, and the reason is,
when DOS assigns drive letters, it goes by *partition*, not by *drive*.
If your "first" drive has 2 DOS partitions, they'll each be assigned a
letter, say, C and D.  If the 2nd drive has no DOS partitions, it will
be skipped.  If the 3rd drive has 1 partition, it might then assigned E.
If you take a drive out of the system, the drive letters assigned to the
remaining drives will move down one.  On very old systems (the original
PC and XT), there could be up to 4 floppy drives, so you could (in
theory) have A,B,C,D all pointing to floppies.  Most later systems only
support 1 or 2 drives, but to facilitate copying floppies, DOS always
reserves A and B for floppies, even though only one drive may physically
be present (if you talk to B, DOS (older versions at least) would prompt
you to swap diskettes.) In environments with networks, it is also
possible to have additional drive letters) beyond those assigned to disk
partitions, that point to network filesystems,, and some versions of dos
support commands that can map and unmap "logical" drive letters.

So far as the win98 MBR goes.  My guess is there's nothing very magical
about it.  As long as you preserve the partitioning information from the
win98 MBR, you should be all set.  There is, however, a very easy way to
deal with this.  If you can find an old copy of DOS, boot up with that,
load debug, and use debug to read the MBR off the hard drive.  You can
then dump and disassemble the MBR to see what it's doing, and equally
usefully, you can *save* the win98 mbr to a diskette file.  You can also
load a diskette file created this way and save it back on the hard disk
as the win98 MBR.  The partition table starts at offset 1beH in the MBR
(if it follows the standard), and consists of 8 bytes and 2 longs:
".byte flag,head,sec,cyl,type,ehead,esect, ecyl; .long start, len" After
the 4 entries in the table, there will be a trailing short at offset
1feH, aa55H.  Keep in mind the shorts and longs will be in little-endian
byte order.

It's certainly perfectly possible to pull your windows drive out,
install linux, then put the windows drive back.  Which drive shows up as
bios 80H,81H, etc., is almost certainly going to be dependent entirely
on hardware cabling and settings.  From what you've said, I gather your
bios gives you some ability to change drive assignments independently of
cable assignment.  If this is done effectively "in hardware", then
switching between linux & windows should be easy.  If it's done in the
bios, then the switch won't be visible to linux (which doesn't use the
bios to talk to the hardware) and may or may not be visible to
windows98.  If it's visible to windows98, then yes, you could use the
bios to switch between operating systems.  Besides switching the drive
assignments, you may also need to switch the "drive number and any other
disk geometry settings that might be stored in CMOS.  On a real
computer, these are stored on the disk; unfortunately, pc compatibles
don't do it this way.

Whenever you're doing *anything* of this nature, you should anticipate
the probability that something could go wrong.  Even if you don't
accidently goof-up and type the wrong thing in, if you're messing with
cables, you could easily plug the wrong thing in or short something out
such that you get the drives hooked up differently than you expected, or
actually destroy a drive.  If there's anything on any of the drives that
you value, you should back it up offline before doing anything else.  If
you don't have the means to back it up, you might either want to invest
in whatever it takes to do a backup, or find a way to measure the worth
of what you have vs. where you'd like to be, and the risk that you might
not get there.

response 195 of 257:

Oct 29 18:31 UTC 1999

You can, too, have a slave without a master. I've done it.

DOS hands out drive letters in order C,D,E,F,... as follows:

        First DOS partition on first hard drive
        First DOS partition on second drive *if present*
        First DOS partition on third hard drive *if present*
        First DOS prtition on fourth hard drive *if present*
        Any remaining DOS partitions on first drive
        Any remaining DOS partitions on second drive
        etc.

Windoze NT does something similar. Putting in a second hard drive screws
everything up because the NTFS partition that it was used to calling D: is
now E: and half the stuff can't find its working directories. But you*can*
use Disk Administrator to change the drive letters. I have adopted the
practice on the communications machine of immediately setting the NT partition
as drive Z, and will move the practice to the main brain when I re-do it. That
way I'll be able to pop drives in and out as much as I like without the drive
letter assignments screwing everything up.

response 197 of 257:

Oct 30 00:07 UTC 1999

Well I finally got it to work!  In fact I'm typing this now over telnet from
Linux Netscape at a rousing 2400 baud.  I xcan boot into Linux from a floppy or
win from power up.  i r I enede up trying the pull the IDE cables and it did
the trick.  Now I need to see if drivers exist for my Yamaha OPL-Sax sound
card.  I also neecd to get a faster external modem to fdo this for real.
:-_0)  Thanks to everyone for their time and effort!

response 199 of 257:

Oct 30 09:07 UTC 1999

You are right it didn't look that bad in the Linux terminal I was in.
Well at least I feel like I'm climbing the mountain now as opposed to
sliding down.  If I do a Linux applications item should I put it here
or in Jellyware? Right now I'm looking for an x-windows apllication that
will format text with as much control and formating capability as
Pagemaker.  Is LateX for page layout?

response 201 of 257:

Oct 31 05:50 UTC 1999

I'd guess most people who use LaTeX or TeX use vi or emacs to create
their source text.

If you want a real bare-knuckles approach, you could try writing
postscript directly.  Since postscript is, among other things, a
stripped down version of a general purpose programming language, there's
no reason why you can't make it do anything you want, within reason.