"mm" wrote in message
...
Can't boot win98! Sectors not found Dos error, right?

I've posted before about the problems I've had booting to win98SE,
after I used Easeus*** to shrink the win98 partition, and I've made
progress**, and I can now boot to Win98 DOS.

But I get a DOS error if I try to do much when I'm there. If I try
to continue on to the Windows of win98, it loads a lot of the things
it is supposed to load, but eventually I get

Sector not found reading drive C:
Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?

If I use the Win98 boot menu and only load DOS, I get a similar sector
error when I try to Edit many but not all normally editable files in
the win98 partition. Like .txt, .bat, and .ini files.

I can provide more details if necessary, the exact text of the error
message Edit gives, the files that I can edit versus the ones I can't,
the log of my boot attempt, the error messages when trying to do a
step-by-step start of win98, whatever you want, but maybe this is
enough.

Any suggestions what is wrong?

Help is much appreciated.


**Background. I have multi-boot with win98 in partition C: and winXP
in partition D:. Everything was fine afaik until I used Easeus
partition software to shrink the win98 partition. At that point, I
could get to the multi-boot menu but couldn't reach win98 at all.

People on the XP newsgroup showed me how to SYS C:, then use DOS Debug
to copy the C: boot sector to bootsect.dos, then to use the XP
Recovery Console FIXBOOT C: to restore the C: bootsector back to what
it was, that is, so it points somehow to the boot.ini, the multi-boot
menu. After that, I could boot to winXP or to the DOS of Win98.


*** I'm 99% sure that Easeus Partition Master got me into this mess.
I also found someone else who said it caused no-start with win98. It
runs under 2000, XP and newer, but it didnt' say it couldn't handle a
winw98 partition while doing so. I"m sure it will do fine, running out
ot XP, with FAT32 etc. when the partition is empty, but it seems that
the boot sector varies with the OS, according to Partition Manager 8,
and they wrote that when there was no reason to exaggerate. That is,
I don't think there was much competition that didn't also fully
support win98.

Did you make a backup before changing your partition size? If not, you need
to stop making changes to it and get another HD and data recovery software
to salvage what you can to another HD. Do not boot to the XP partition as
the more you do that, then the less likely you will be able to recover
anything. If you do have a backup, then I would use the HD mfr's diagnostics
disk to requalify the HD before restoring it.

--
Todd Vargo

(Post questions to group only. Remove "z" to email personal messages)