Win98 won't boot.

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 16:15:47 -0400, mm
wrote:

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:01:04 -0400, Bill Blanton
wrote:

On 9/28/2010 08:53, dadiOH wrote:
mm wrote:
On Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:07:35 -0400,
wrote:

mm wrote:

Partition 1, the win98 partition is marked System and Primary.

Is it also C:? Needs to be.

Yes. I should have said that.

And the winXP is D:

I'm narrowing in on the problem, and though it was once the boot
sector, I think that I repaired the boot sector with XXCLone, because
repairing it again with Repair Console didn't make an apparent
difference. Now I think what's left is a win98 only problem. I'll
get to that later in another post.

You need to repair the Win98 boot sector with a Win98 boot floppy, *NOT*
WinXP or its repair console.

That's not correct dadiOH.. When you install XP after 98 and let MS set
up its boot manager, XP writes out the 98 boot sector to c:\bootsect.dos
and overwrites the 98 boot sector. The NT boot files, ntldr,
ntdetect.com and boot.ini are also written to C:\ (the active 98 volume).

The "new" boot sector searches out ntldr, and if 98 is chosen then the
"old" boot sector (now in bootsect.dos) is loaded. A 9x sys will make 9x
look for io.sys, and make XP non-bootable.

I have io.sys (and msdos.sys for some reason). Why would using that be
so bad? Is it because it goes to io.sys first and that would mean it
wouldn't go to boot.ini, so that menu would never appear, but win98
would always start, assuming it could start?

On a properly set up system anyway. I'm not sure mm has the 9x boot
volume set as the active partition.

Yes, I do.

Until last week everything but one was set up just as MS wanted it.
win98 on partition C and winXP on D, with the boot.ini in C:.
Bootsect.dos is there too.

The only exception is that for some reason the D partition is the
first and only logical drive in an extended partition. I guess I did
that, not MS, and I don't remember why.

The reason the D partition is a logical drive in an extended partition
is Windows 98 will only install onto a drive that has only one primary
partition. If Windows 98 setup sees more than one primary partition on
the hard drive, it won't proceed.

The way I would fix your Windows 98 problem is:
1. Create a floppy diskette that allows you to boot to Windows XP (see
http://www.theeldergeek.com/create_xp_boot_disk.htm) from the
diskette. Verify that it works.
2. Download Boot Sector Explorer and save it on the Windows XP
partition
(http://web.archive.org/web/200807182...orexplorer.php)
3. Save all of the files on drive C (including all hidden files except
for bootsect.dos since it's bad) onto another drive. This can be done
while running Windows XP.
4. Use fdisk to delete the primary partition, create a new primary
partition of the desired size, and make it active.
5. Use format /s c: to make the C drive bootable to DOS.
6. Boot to Windows XP using the diskette created in step 1.
7. Use Boot Sector Explorer to copy the drive C boot sector to file
c:\bootsect.dos.
8. Copy the files saved in step 3. back to the C drive.
9. Use the Windows XP recovery console fixboot command to write the XP
boot sector.

In message , Bill in Co
writes:
[]
That's not a "backup option". I regret to inform you your mind
has been partially corrupted by MS.

I hate to inform you, but it IS (in some respects) a form of backup, or more
accurately, a "fallback scheme", to get up and running again. So in that
sense it can act like a backup, for system recovery purposes. But do bear
in mind that at least I've had some firsthand experience with it (and
ERUNT), so I *know* what it can - and cannot - do, firsthand, and not just
by "reading about it".

What do you use to boot into, to get to the point where you can use the
files ERUNT produces - or do you use it on a FAT rather than NTFS
system? (I've forgotten what what I use is called - it's the one the
author if ERUNT suggested, when I asked him this important question.)

BTW, you REALLY should try to learn to snip, or at least
SQUARE. ;-)


You mean you want this one? [ ]

LOL.

46 lines snipped

Nah, I really think content is best preserved, and not edited out.

It is preserved, by Google Groups and the like. I'm in favour of mild
snipping, though I don't feel strongly about it.

I think people that are too lazy to read are just what I call "newagers".

I'm not sure how that relates to snipping - unless you want to force
people to read _again_ (and again). Not wishing to do that isn't, to me,
lazy (-:! [And I'm certainly not a "newager", whatever that might be!]

And sadly, it's not all that uncommon these days, with the prevalant
attention span of these recents generations being measured in milliseconds,
or so it seems. That, and their stupid cell phones, for which there is no
escape, for anybody!!!. :-)

(Someone sent me an animated cartoon the other day about a persistent
user of a fobile moan, who got it shoved where the sun don't shine, by a
Clint lookalike.)

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

.... back in the olden days ... Britain was entirely made of wood and lit by
one enormous candle, tended by the Queen
- Steven Moffat, Radio Times, 24-30 July 2010

In message , mm
writes:
[]
C:\Windows\System\Ontracks.386


So it seems like this is a win98 problem, not related to multi-boot.

There is no reference to ontracks.386 in my system.ini, that I can
see, but I remember there was a list of executables that ran that
wasn't in system.ini or boot.ini. I forget where it was.
[]
This may be a complete red herring, but OnTrack - without the s - used
to be one of those boot utilities that allowed you to use a larger hard
disc than your BIOS (or it might have been OS) could handle: it loaded
before the OS. I think the name continued for a bit, for similar
utilities, before it was absorbed by one of its competitors.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

.... back in the olden days ... Britain was entirely made of wood and lit by
one enormous candle, tended by the Queen
- Steven Moffat, Radio Times, 24-30 July 2010

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Bill in Co
writes:
[]
That's not a "backup option". I regret to inform you your mind
has been partially corrupted by MS.

I hate to inform you, but it IS (in some respects) a form of backup, or
more
accurately, a "fallback scheme", to get up and running again. So in
that
sense it can act like a backup, for system recovery purposes. But do
bear
in mind that at least I've had some firsthand experience with it (and
ERUNT), so I *know* what it can - and cannot - do, firsthand, and not
just
by "reading about it".

What do you use to boot into, to get to the point where you can use the
files ERUNT produces - or do you use it on a FAT rather than NTFS
system? (I've forgotten what what I use is called - it's the one the
author if ERUNT suggested, when I asked him this important question.)

I usually just reboot into windows (Normal or Safe Mode); if and when I
couldn't even do that, it would be a different story, of course. So I can
(and have on various occasions) use ERUNT to undo and clean up some errant
behavior(s) after some program installations (for example) go bad, or just
to conveniently undo and clean up some registry changes either I or some
program(s) have recently made. So in that sense it's a form of a system
backup, or a system fallback, to be more accurate. Obviously the only real
and complete backup comes from an image or clone of the system, however.
But I have found both very useful (and very occasionally, System Restore).

Different tools in the toolbelt, so to speak, each with their own advantages
and disadvantages. But that's another story... "There are eight million
stories in the Naked City, and this has been one of them." (from the old
"Naked City" series)

snip

On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:55:17 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , mm
writes:
[]
C:\Windows\System\Ontracks.386


So it seems like this is a win98 problem, not related to multi-boot.

There is no reference to ontracks.386 in my system.ini, that I can
see, but I remember there was a list of executables that ran that
wasn't in system.ini or boot.ini. I forget where it was.
[]
This may be a complete red herring, but OnTrack - without the s - used
to be one of those boot utilities that allowed you to use a larger hard
disc than your BIOS (or it might have been OS) could handle: it loaded
before the OS. I think the name continued for a bit, for similar
utilities, before it was absorbed by one of its competitors.

Hmm. I might have had that. I'm always behind the times wrt mother
board, but getting new harddrives. Once I had to buy a Promise Card to
run ATA, or something. (And it's really tricky to read files years
later that were written with such software, on a computer that doesn't
require it. There are two or three choices to make, making 4 or 8
possible combinations of answers, and not all get you into the system.
Of course maybe it will be easier if I slave the drive. I don't think
I did that the last time.)

But anyhow, I looked more at the bootlog.txt and bootlog.prv, and they
each go on for a long time after I got that error message, with
nothing but successes, and I don't think that is the reason it
wouldn't start.

Also since then I have several win98 boot floppies around here but I
dl'd the files again from bootdisk.com and made a floppy and booted,
and looked around the drive. Config.sys and autoexec.bat and four
other text-type files chosen at random on the root directory couldn't
be opened. "Sector not found" (Even though they can all be opened from
winXP in the D: partition! How is that possible.) So I think there
is some addressing problem and it's not really ontracks.386's fault.
Oh yeah, I replaced that file with a backup copy and the error didn't
change.

Thanks a lot.

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
...
In message , mm
writes:
[]
C:\Windows\System\Ontracks.386


So it seems like this is a win98 problem, not related to multi-boot.

There is no reference to ontracks.386 in my system.ini, that I can
see, but I remember there was a list of executables that ran that
wasn't in system.ini or boot.ini. I forget where it was.
[]
This may be a complete red herring, but OnTrack - without the s - used to
be one of those boot utilities that allowed you to use a larger hard disc
than your BIOS (or it might have been OS) could handle: it loaded before
the OS. I think the name continued for a bit, for similar utilities,
before it was absorbed by one of its competitors.

Yes, it appears to be a driver for "Ontrack". If this is a DDO, then it is
no wonder it has problems accessing the drive. In fact, things *might* have
been written to the wrong places had the disk been accessed for writing.

On 9/30/2010 03:43, mm wrote:
On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:55:17 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:
In , mm
writes:

C:\Windows\System\Ontracks.386

This may be a complete red herring, but OnTrack - without the s - used
to be one of those boot utilities that allowed you to use a larger hard
disc than your BIOS (or it might have been OS) could handle: it loaded
before the OS. I think the name continued for a bit, for similar
utilities, before it was absorbed by one of its competitors.

Hmm. I might have had that. I'm always behind the times wrt mother
board, but getting new harddrives.

If you did have Ontrack's DDO installed then the XXClone op to write a
new MBR could have erased Ontrack's loader code. Most DDOs load at boot
from the MBR and are in place before the OS is loaded.

[snip]

But anyhow, I looked more at the bootlog.txt and bootlog.prv, and they
each go on for a long time after I got that error message, with
nothing but successes, and I don't think that is the reason it
wouldn't start.

Also since then I have several win98 boot floppies around here but I
dl'd the files again from bootdisk.com and made a floppy and booted,
and looked around the drive. Config.sys and autoexec.bat and four
other text-type files chosen at random on the root directory couldn't
be opened. "Sector not found" (Even though they can all be opened from
winXP in the D: partition! How is that possible.)

Once XP is loaded it doesn't use the BIOS disk services that a DDO
replaces. It is somewhat surprising that XP would load and 98 not,, if
XP follows 98 on the disk.

How big is the drive?
If you boot into the BIOS setup, how big does it report the drive as
being? How many CHS, and/or LBA does it show?

On Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:58:49 -0400, Bill Blanton
wrote:

On 9/30/2010 03:43, mm wrote:
On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:55:17 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:
In , mm
writes:

C:\Windows\System\Ontracks.386

This may be a complete red herring, but OnTrack - without the s - used
to be one of those boot utilities that allowed you to use a larger hard
disc than your BIOS (or it might have been OS) could handle: it loaded
before the OS. I think the name continued for a bit, for similar
utilities, before it was absorbed by one of its competitors.

Hmm. I might have had that. I'm always behind the times wrt mother
board, but getting new harddrives.

If you did have Ontrack's DDO installed

Well, I'm not sure. It might have been before the crash and start
over, and yet ontracks.386 came from someoehwere.

(When I go to a doctor, I can no longer remember my family medical
history anymore, what my grandparents had and died of, for example.
I'm not even positive what diseases I had. I"m only 63. )

then the XXClone op to write a
new MBR could have erased Ontrack's loader code. Most DDOs load at boot
from the MBR and are in place before the OS is loaded.

[snip]

But anyhow, I looked more at the bootlog.txt and bootlog.prv, and they
each go on for a long time after I got that error message, with
nothing but successes, and I don't think that is the reason it
wouldn't start.

Also since then I have several win98 boot floppies around here but I
dl'd the files again from bootdisk.com and made a floppy and booted,
and looked around the drive. Config.sys and autoexec.bat and four
other text-type files chosen at random on the root directory couldn't
be opened. "Sector not found" (Even though they can all be opened from
winXP in the D: partition! How is that possible.)

Once XP is loaded it doesn't use the BIOS disk services that a DDO
replaces. It is somewhat surprising that XP would load and 98 not,, if
XP follows 98 on the disk.

How big is the drive?

80 gigs.

If you boot into the BIOS setup, how big does it report the drive as
being? How many CHS, and/or LBA does it show?

On 9/30/2010 21:50, mm wrote:
On Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:58:49 -0400, Bill Blanton
wrote:

How big is the drive?

80 gigs.



If you boot into the BIOS setup, how big does it report the drive as
being? How many CHS, and/or LBA does it show?

and..?

In message , Bill in Co
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
[]
What do you use to boot into, to get to the point where you can use the
files ERUNT produces - or do you use it on a FAT rather than NTFS
system? (I've forgotten what what I use is called - it's the one the
author if ERUNT suggested, when I asked him this important question.)

I usually just reboot into windows (Normal or Safe Mode); if and when I
couldn't even do that, it would be a different story, of course. So I can
(and have on various occasions) use ERUNT to undo and clean up some errant
behavior(s) after some program installations (for example) go bad, or just
to conveniently undo and clean up some registry changes either I or some
[]
I've remembered the name of the other thing I installed with ERUNT: it's
Bart PE. This appears alongside Windows in a boot menu for a few seconds
(ISTR I reduced the number of seconds). I have established that I can
boot into it and use an ERUNT restore, though fortunately haven't ever
had to do so so far: this XP Home seems a lot more stable than I
expected. (Not, for that matter, that I've had a BSOD for months if not
years on my '98 systems either, but I use this one for most things now,
so they're getting a lot less use.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

DOS means never having to live hand-to-mouse.