Hi again, given that I have very little information about your problem and situation, I just give you a very big pile of ideas - maybe there is something useful in it, or maybe something to ponder further.
>> First of all, I did not make myslf clear. I was not running win98. >> I was only running the dos portion of win98. I wrote over the dos >> portion of win98 with freedos using the sys command. My concerns >> are two: > > 1) In a multi-partitioned environment, how am I supposed to correctly > install freedos on a partition without writing over the mbr where > grub/lilo/etc resides. The SYS command does not overwrite the MBR. So DOS only boots when you select to boot from the DOS partititon in your GRUB / LILO menu. I am assuming that your boot menu does not need a copy of the DOS boot sector as a file. Instead, I assume that your coresponding menu item is defined as "(chain-)boot the boot sector of that partition". If your menu does support boot sector files, that obviously gives the interesting opportunity to have MS DOS and FreeDOS in separate menu items while both DOS versions still share the C: drive, but you already said that you do not need that. What happens if you select Linux in your boot menu now? You wrote that there was a problem for you to boot Linux at the moment. Or is the boot menu itself not there? If so, how did booting Linux work BEFORE you installed FreeDOS? Maybe you had a boot menu in MS DOS, not in the MBR? Note that you can use menus like metakern and grub4dos that can be installed on a DOS partititon: Metakern for example has the option to boot your Linux partition. It is possible that there is a LILO or GRUB *there* which then loads Linux. If you install grub4dos, you can even define menu items to boot specific Linux kernel files, but I myself have no experience with grub4dos... Also note that no matter if you have your Linux boot menu in the MBR or at another location, the MBR also contains a boot flag telling which partition is booted by default. It might be that one setting brings you to a boot menu installed in a partition while another just directly boots the operating system installed in another partition. I am not sure which situation you get with the boot menu installed in the MBR, but most boot menu systems have a tool to reinstall the boot menu itself without touching the partitioning. While it was once popular to have boot menus in the MBR, I would now prefer having them installed in the partition of the operating system to which they belong (only if they do support doing that in a safe way without breaking contents of that partition, of course!) to avoid having to "fight" over which operating system gets to put their menu stuff in the MBR. Linux against Windows / MS DOS, for example... According to wikipedia, GRUB 1 is installed in the MBR and a few kilobytes following, while GRUB 2 is installed in the MBR and optionally in the boot sector of a Linux partition of your choice and in a few kilobytes after the MBR. That gives you a second possibility to boot GRUB 2 even if the MBR itself is in use by something else... For EFI systems, a small boot partition is used, not "few kilobytes ..." but EFI only applies to computers much newer than yours. LILO can be installed in the MBR or the boot sector of a Linux partition, too, plus either a few kilobytes after the MBR or some sectors at some other place (the place info can be updated by some tool). The LOADLIN boot menu, finally, is a DOS program which lets you boot Linux kernels from DOS, but you have to copy the kernel to a DOS-reachable place. SYSLINUX is vaguely similar to LOADLIN. As you see, there are many ways to boot Linux, e.g. PLoP, Smart Boot Manager, NTLDR, XOSL, GAG, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_boot_loaders > 1a) Do I need to install FreeDOS on each fat32 partition? As with MS DOS 7.10, you only have to install FreeDOS on C: to boot from it. You can then use the other partitions as other drive letters. Simply the same as with Microsoft :-) > 2) Now I am unable to access my linux partition. This drive has 6 > partitions. Three are fat32 dos partitions, one is Linux swap, one > is Linux and the last is about 2 gb laying fallow. Because SYS does not change the MBR, I wonder which other step damaged your boot menu. I hope you have not changed partitions with FDISK? If only your GRUB or LILO are damaged, you could boot Linux from a CD, DVD, USB, network or similar and "simply" install GRUB or LILO again. I think SuSE even had some boot CD menu option for repairing installed Linux / make it boot again. I think your problem can be solved in two directions: If you are experienced with the low-level side of Linux, you probably can solve it yourself more easily than explaining all details now. On the other hand, you may want to explain what exactly is the current situation and what exactly caused it and what exactly was the original situation, possibly interactively on IRC or Skype or similar, to get more specific instructions. As you noticed, I somehow have a tendency to misunderstand you when your descriptions are short. Part of this is because when Win 98 was still popular, people typically wanted to install FreeDOS but still keep Win 98 or MS DOS 7 working at the same time. Sometimes they even only wanted to try FreeDOS, so they just wanted to get rid of FreeDOS and wanted to boot only MS DOS 7 or Win 98 again. Which is why I assumed you wanted to do the same. But now you explained that you actually want to put FreeDOS instead of MS "DOS" 7 but now FreeDOS shows a warning about geometry and there is SOME problem in booting Linux or in accessing the Linux partitions from FreeDOS or similar... Maybe another expert already has an idea or maybe you yourself already have an idea for (carefully!) repairing your boot menu, or maybe you want to start by explaining the problem in more detail. In any case, please keep us informed and stay safe :-) Regards, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
