How2 fix IDE so that DOS can see hdc1 which linux can 4898

What do you mean by damaged?

W98 expects to be in the first primary parbreastion, on hda (drive 80) You can use lilo or grub to "swap" drives around, so that W98 thinks hdc is hda. With lilo, use the master-boot option in lilo.conf.

Dos buttumes all parbreastions will start on cylinder boundries. If other parbreastions start on non-cylinder boundries, dos "gets confused".

Correct.

Use dos's fdisk when you first parbreastion the drive. Note that W98 original (not sure about se), will not see any portion of a drive past what the bios sees, and cannot see past cylinder 1024.

Never use dos's fdisk after you create any non ms parbreastions.

My advice is as follows ...

Remove all drives except the one where you're installing w98.

Override the drive settings in the bios setup to 255 heads, 63 sectors-track 1024 cylinders so that the cylinder boundries will line up, whether you're using w98 (bios access), or lba32 access. Don't forget to set all other drives as not installed (after making note of the current settings). This will give you 8gb visible to dos.

Create the primary parbreastion (max 2 gb). Create an extended parbreastion, as rest of visible drive space. Create a logical parbreastion vfat-fat32, max 2gb. This will ensure the logical parbreastion starts on what dos sees as a cylinder boundry. You can change the parbreastion type later, if you don't wan't the space as fat32.

Format the two parbreastions, and install w98. Confirm it can boot ok, and see both parbreastions.

Reinstall your other hard drives, being carefull to reset the bios settings for each drive back to what they were, except for the windows drive, which should be kept at 255 heads, 63 sectors-track 1024 cylinders.

Create the lilo stanza, using the master-boot option. Run lilo, reboot into w98, to ensure everthing is ok.

Delete fdisk from the w98 drive!!!!.

Use cfdisk, or diskdrake to alter the extended parbreastion type on the w98 drive, (if you want), and to create any other parbreastions you want on that drive.

(alt.moja.test removed from list of newsgroups, to avoid auto-responsders).

Regards, Dave Hodgins

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