Oh dear, what have I broke?

[joshua]

system is Win98se. tried to run the live cd, had no problems until a few lines into the install when the little cursor stopped blinking and the whole thing locked up. Eventually haveing tried some of the cheat codes I tried Failsafe and it worked ok. After logging out I removed the cd and booted back into windows and it wouldn't, now I can only get 98 to run in safe mode. I have tried all the usual interactive things to see if any drivers have been corrupted etc but 98 locks up on the 98se splash screen, I have also removed the graphics card drivers and reinstalled them but the problem still remains. Any ideas, suggestions anyone?

[Stryker87]

formate & reinstall windows???????

[robwelch100]

Joshua,
please clarify, did you run the live cd only or did you initiate a hd install?
Win 98 is not friendly to multiple os's. I only use third party partitioning software and bootloaders. Partition magic and bootmagic are good ones. Also for a lot less $ partition commander works about not as well (less intuitive). I can only assume that you tried an install. The live cd does not write anything to disk or the MBR on it. You may very well need to reinstall windows. I would recomend upgrading to xp. It works well with other os's, relatively speaking. Every prior windows version can be a bit quarky.

If you choose to reinstall 98. You can do an install on top of the old one. DO NOT FORMAT uless you want a clean slate. It never hurts to see if you can repair the old install first by running the install and leaving the current file system intact. If it loads and hangs on the splash screen then an on top reinstall may be the way to go. I would format but I have 8 partitions on 4 hard drives and I don't put information I want to keep on the same drive as my OS. That way a reinstall does mess with my important stuff.

[CrashedAgain]

system is Win98se. tried to run the live cd, had no problems until a few lines into the install when the little cursor stopped blinking and the whole thing locked up. Eventually haveing tried some of the cheat codes I tried Failsafe and it worked ok. After logging out I removed the cd and booted back into windows and it wouldn't, now I can only get 98 to run in safe mode. I have tried all the usual interactive things to see if any drivers have been corrupted etc but 98 locks up on the 98se splash screen, I have also removed the graphics card drivers and reinstalled them but the problem still remains. Any ideas, suggestions anyone?

It sounds like Knoppix started to partition your HD but fell off the perch when the partition was in progress. I had a similar problem once when Mandrake decided to change the Windows filesystem type to VFAT(hidden) instead of VFAT. It gave similar symptoms. Changing it back corrected the problem with no loss of anything.
Run the Knoppix CD, cfdisk (from terminal) or QT parted (from menu) & find out what your HD looks like. cfdisk output might look something like this:
cfdisk 2.11z

Disk Drive: /dev/hda
Size: 40992473088 bytes, 40.9 GB
Heads: 240 Sectors per Track: 63 Cylinders: 5295

Name Flags Part Type FS Type [Label] Size (MB)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hda1 Boot Primary Win95 FAT32 4923.56
hda5 Logical Linux ext3 3251.41
hda6 Logical Linux swap 526.42
hda7 Logical Win95 FAT32 27187.94
hda9 Logical Linux swap 596.10
hda8 Logical Linux ext3 4505.52







[Bootable] [ Delete ] [ Help ] [Maximize] [ Print ]
[ Quit ] [ Type ] [ Units ] [ Write ]

Toggle bootable flag of the current partition

Joshua,
please clarify, did you run the live cd only or did you initiate a hd install?
Win 98 is not friendly to multiple os's. I only use third party partitioning software and bootloaders. Partition magic and bootmagic are good ones. Also for a lot less $ partition commander works about not as well (less intuitive). I can only assume that you tried an install. The live cd does not write anything to disk or the MBR on it. You may very well need to reinstall windows. I would recomend upgrading to xp. It works well with other os's, relatively speaking. Every prior windows version can be a bit quarky.

My experience has been different from yours and I would NOT recommend upgrading to XP unless you can do it for free & have a really good reason to change. Two points against XP:
1)XP will refuse to install some older software so you may have to give up your favorite program unless an upgrade is available.
2) XP defaults to NTFS filesystem type which raises compatibility issues with Linux. Only the very newest Linux releases are able to write to NTFS filesystems.
I'm currently using ME dual or triple booted to Mandrake &/or Knoppix. not that I particularly like ME, it's just that it was already on the box.
Reputedly the most stable Windows is 2000.
I have done several dual boot installations with Win98 & WinME & not found any problems, in fact 98 is easier than ME because ME uses the last track of the disk as well as the first which can cause problems for some partition programs. I have not had any data loss using Linux cfdisk or qtparted to partition 98/ME disks.

[joshua]

Sorry about the delay in replying, all I did was run the cd I didn't try the hd install. I have managed to get into dos and use fdisk to check the partitions. All seems ok with just the normal win98 bits there. The correct bit is active but it still won't boot up in anything but safe mode or the failsafe option on the knoppix cd. If it try the normal boot from the cd it runs fine until the line about the apm module it completes the line and then stops dead. The cursor doesn't even blink. With 98 it fires up ok until it gets to the win98 splash screen then after around 10-20secs it also freezes. As everything seems to begin to load ok I was wondering if an component had coincedently failed just as I tried the knoppix run the first time. I have now also tried Mandrake 9.1 this also loaded ok until it said second stage install at which point it also froze.

[CrashedAgain]

Try booting Knoppix 'knoppix noapm'. This will disable starting the apm which may get it going. Also check your bios settings, you may find something out of order there.