Quote Originally Posted by turbine
Wow! Thank you all very much for your help.

There are 2 things that make me leery about doing this reinstall process. First when I do boot into win98, win98 doesn't recognize my linux partitions at all. They don't show up in the file manager. ...
Of course not. Windows can't use those partitions (access files on them) so it doesn't show them to you. But if you run Win98 fdisk it does know that the partitions are there, it just calls them something like unknown type. It will leave them alone, which is what you want. Some older versions of fdisk wouldn't even be willing to delete them if you wanted, but I think MS has "fixed" that.

Quote Originally Posted by turbine
.... Second I wiped out my entire linux os once by running Norton Antivirus on the win98 side. Norton told me that there was a potential virus in my mbr and asked if I wanted it restored. I said yes. Later when I tried booting into knoppix, I discovered that everything was gone.
I'm not a big Norton fan (and that's putting it very mildly), but are you sure that the Linux partitions were gone? I would have expected it to wipe out Lilo on your MBR, but having done something to the partition table seems strange. And what did it put in the partition table slots where the linux partitions used to be? It certainly shouldn't have given the space back to the Windows partition by replacing the entire sector zero rather than just the MBR portion of it,, that would have messed up the Windows partition too. Even if it did remove the partition table entry for the linux partitions (which still seems unlikely), you could have recovered them with gpart. One thing learned here is never to let Norton "fix" a MBR.


None of the above should be taken as an endorsement for installing Knoppix on the hard drive rather than Debian or other Linux distro intended for hard drive installation.