VOGONS


First post, by Capsndave

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Hi, I'm reaching out for a bit of help. I have a K6-III 450AHX on a PC Chips M577 with IDE Seagate Medalist 6424 (6.5GB), loaded with Win98 on a single partition, which for a SS7 runs with good stability.

Anyway, I've been moving some cards around and added an SB AWE 64 and I've messed it up. After this it was not booting into Windows 98 (never-ending win98 screen) and I couldn't do a safeboot. I booted up using boot disk and I was struggling to load from C: drive.

Wrongly probably, I ran fdisk /mbr to try and fix boot issues which is where it went really wrong. Btw, I don't have a back-up of the MBR

Bios sees the disk OK but won't load. It says "Starting Windows 98" but wants to find the command com on the A: drive. Consequently it will load a boot disk but doesn't see C: on the HDD at all. However it will nominate the CD drive as C: when running boot disk with CD-ROM support.

I've had a look in fdisk, the partition is Active, but it is reporting the HDD as a 6.4 GB 'Non-Dos' partition rather than 'PRI DOS'.

I don't want to re-format and lose everything that is on the drive, and would like to recover the Win 98 configuration as it was before., so I think my issue is how do I convert the primary partition on the HDD from 'Non-DOS' to 'PRI DOS'?

If someone is handy with the fdisk and MBR tools and commands for a bit of advice on fixing this without losing the data that will be great.

Thanks

Reply 1 of 2, by Horun

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Can you run some tool off a bootable DOS 7 floppy that actually reports the partition/mbr info ?
Something like Norton Disk Edit, TestDisk, PBR/Media Tools Pro, PTS DiskEditor or something similar ?
Just make sure you use what it view the data and do not change anything, just record the info...

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

Reply 2 of 2, by Capsndave

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Thanks Horun,
These are great suggestions that I'm sure are the right way to go. I have a recovery suite from Laze soft that I might try as well. I've used Lazesoft Recovery Suite from a boot USB on other systems and it's very good, but I'll have to burn it to a bootable CD for this machine. Btw. The password discovery tool in this software is a god send if you ever run into lost password issues.
I have fixed boot sector problems before, but it's so infrequent that I have to start re-learning from scratch, so it generally takes me a long time to do. I was hoping someone could suggest a few deft key strokes that would sort me out, but sadly it's never quite so simple. The basic DOS tools really aren't sufficient so hopefully the tools you mention here will do the job. I'll put my thinking cap on whilst tidying up all the old hardware I've been playing with recently before giving it a go.
B/w. D