Can I reinstall win98 without wiping out knoppix hdd?

[mr_ed]

I'm dual booting knoppix and win98 using boot floppy to bring up knoppix. My current win98 needs to be re-installed but I'm concerned that said installation will:
a: Fool with my mbr thereby eliminating any semblance of my knoppix install

Yup, I expect it will do that. You'll likely need to run lilo again....

Harry is being restrained here. If Windows doesn't overwrite your MBR, then Microsoft wants to know about it, fast!

But that doesn't eliminate Knoppix by a long shot. Well, first of all, you're booting from a floppy - that will still work.

And LILO has three pieces - the one that gets installed to either the Master Boot Record or the Partition Boot Sector is only one of them, and it can be rebuilt with the other two very easily.

First, there's the LILO program itself. That's still there in your Knoppix partition. And so is its configuration file, /etc/lilo.conf. All ya gotta do is be in your Knoppix partition and, as root, type # lilo.

Now here's the beauty part of keeping your Knoppix CD around even after you've installed it to hard drive. Suppose your floppy stops working and Martians rewrite the MBR with gibberish. (In fact, NetBSD did just that to me a couple of days ago....)

You can boot from the CD, get into the Knoppix hard-drive partition, run LILO, and restore a multi-boot MBR. Suppose Knoppix is on partition hda2. You do this in a terminal window:

(CD)$ su
(CD)# mount [-o remount rw] /mnt/hda2
(CD)# chroot /mnt/hda2
(hda2)# lilo
(hda2)# exit
(CD)# reboot (or whatever)

You only use the part inside the [brackets] - but without the [ and ] - if you had the Knoppix CD automount the partition before you do this operation. Maybe you clicked on its icon on the desktop.

When you do that, Knoppix mounts hard-drive partitions as read-only, so you need to remount it with the option read/write. You can check to see what's mounted, and where and how, by typing the command $ mount with nothing after it.

But if you just boot the CD and go straight to a terminal window, you don't need the part in the brackets.

Hope this helps!

-- Ed