I have (had?!) redhat 9.0 dual booting with win98SE. Tried the allegedly simple "FDISK /MBR" route to clearing out redhat so i could save some hdd space and just use knoppix CD and then ...

on boot i get the normal boot messages, windows boot begins and then i am left with just an "a>" prompt asking me to tell it where command.com is. I duly oblige and of course nothing happens. GRUB does not load so i have nowhere else to go.

I understand that i can use dd to restore the old 98 mbr from /boot/boot.b but wanted to save what is there at the moment by loading knoppix CD and going from there. I have successfully copied boot.d onto a floppy so have some insurance but then i tried

dd if=/mnt/hda1 of=/mnt/floppy/badmbr.bk bs=446 count=1

then i get "/mnt/hda1 is a directory" and nothing happens (I was trying to copy the mbr w/o the partition table to a file called badmrb.bk on my floppy).

Have also tried to go into rh 9.0 rescue mode but cant cd into hda2 (the linux partition) to track down boot.d - if i could I might just copy that straight to the windows partition and see what happens.

Am happy to try alternative approaches but i keep finding 80% solutions which dont quite seem to make it. Would be grateful for any suggestions people might have on this. general approach seems quite clear ie using "dd" but specific implementation under KNoppix is eluding me.

Thanks in advance.