[ConfusedGeek]

hi everyone this is my first post here....
i seem to have a very interesting problem ....

someting akin to having a whole bottle of coke ... but not able to drink it..cuz u dont have a bottle opener ..

it all stared when my brother made a really horrible mistake of installing window me.....i know..really stupid mistake...i was quite :mad: &

but anyway what happend is that though he has done a clean install
....and put in C:\(my original 98 is in D:\)...windows me has just made 98 disappear ...my guess is that it has overwritten the MBR...

all file of 98 are intact and have not been touched...

here are the steps that i have done till now and failed.

1) first thing i did was place a boot.ini file with the following info.. in my primary partition (note no boot.ini file was present before which was )

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 98"
C:\="Microsoft Windows me"

now even after this the options menu did not come even after pressing 98....
note: i have my ori 98 in partition on my second harddrive

2) Now that that failed i realised that me had destroyed the mbr so i half installed
XP which fixed up the mbr to use the boot.ini..
now when i selected the 98 option it gave me an error

Windows can not be started because there some change your hardware configuration.Please re-install 98.

Now why this happens i do not know ..please

Note i do not want to reinstall 98 cuz..
a) I love challenges..
b) I have no interest in wasting my time reinstalling all the other softwares

Hope u guys can help me......
bye..

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I can barely understand what you did....sorry.

First, windows me, 98 never used boot.ini--not sure what you were hoping to accomplish there.

Second, the mbr for windows 98*admin is completely different for XP.

What do you mean you half installed XP?

What is your ultimate goal here?

You have...two harddrives? One harddrive with two partitions?

When this whole thing began, you had....what? When all was working?

[gerryf]

I can barely understand what you did....sorry.

First, windows me, 98 never used boot.ini--not sure what you were hoping to accomplish there.

Second, the mbr for windows 98*admin is completely different for XP.

What do you mean you half installed XP?

What is your ultimate goal here?

You have...two harddrives? One harddrive with two partitions?

When this whole thing began, you had....what? When all was working?

[ConfusedGeek]

sorry if i confused u... to answer ur question one by one

1) i had XP and 98 on the same system. on "C:\" and "D:\" drive respectively....XP had some probm so my brother formatted C:\
and installed winME.... now the problem is that somehow i am not able to go into 98...i.e the options menu does not come....

2)when i mean 'half installed XP' it means that i installed xp till the point when in reboots and the options menu comes back on

3)I have 2 hardrives a 40 gb one and an 80 gb one
the 40 gb one is the secondary master
the 80 gb one is the primary master ...
i have 98 installed on the primary patition of the 40 gb drive which is D:

my ultimate goal is to gain acces back to the original 98 since all its files are intact

[gerryf]

much clearer...and now some of what you said makes more sense.

Who set this up for you (windows xp on c:, windows 98 on D:)

It is very easy to have a dual boot system if you install windows 98 first, then windows xp, second, but usually this means setting up windows 98 on the first drive or partition, then installing windows xp.

It is tricky doing a dual boot system with xp installed first, then adding windows 98, which is what appears to have been done. Did you do it, or someone else?

Why have you not reinstalled xp to c:?

[ConfusedGeek]

I set up both of this...
actually i had set up first XP ..and then 98 ...
But the my xp got corrupted due to some failure(will alsk about that later) as a result had to shift to 98....

actually 98 was not giving any problems.. except it just would not go online using my cable modem which i got 2 days back...

so my brothe had to install ME...he is not much of a whiz in computers..
when all of this happens

as to why i did not install xp...well as i told u above due to some failures which do not allow me to install windows XP...i will be posting about it soon in winXP section

[gerryf]

I almost think we would need to address that first (xp), or temporarily drop windows 98 harddrive into the primary master position, then get a windows98 boot disk, run fdisk /mbr on it

Windows98, by itself, cannot boot from a second drive, second partition or beyond a certain sector of the first drive.

Your windows xp installation allowed windows 98 to boot from the second drive because it had a boot loader...to accomplish what you are trying, you need a boot loader from xp or a third party boot loader.

So, the question long term is what do you want to do? If you want to get back to where you were, we need to address xp problem first
(otherwise, we will boot to 98, fix xp, then have to redo 98 again)

[ConfusedGeek]

ok give me a sec ...i will be posting my question in the windows xp section