Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> On 12/9/05, sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> > I also have two 2-3GB disks from which I can no longer boot into DOS, but
> > they work fine for linux as slave drive, booting with loadlin.  They have
> > bad boot sectors.  Can lilo be used with them as master (without DOS)?
>
> Have you tried 'fdisk /mbr' in DOS? It will reinstall the master boot record,
> which includes the DOS bootloader. I think I read somewhere that
> cfdisk, even with the -z option, absolutely cannot create a partition table
> if you do not already have a good one. You need to use Linux or DOS
> fdisk (not cfdisk) or another partitioning tool.
>
> David

Today someone explained that each partition has a boot record, and if the 
one near the beginning of the disk (after partition table area) goes bad, 
you can boot from a second partition.  Unless your BIOS lets you boot from 
C D E F (SCSI, zip100, etc.), make a very small first partition and do not 
format it, and format the second partition as C.  So the 2GB DOS drive can 
be reused for DOS, but now I have linux, I shrank DOS to under 500MB 
including lots of photos and midi files.

I brought him my 6G drive that would not let me write the partition table 
with linux cfdisk or PQMagic.

He confirmed the problem in DOS with fdisk, moved the jumper from slave to 
master, and it worked in DOS and linux.  I moved it back to slave and it 
still worked in linux.  It now contained the four partitions I had made, 
but 
not formatted.  I could see Windows files on the first one.  I ran mke2fs 
and will use the drive now.  Perhaps the pins for 'master' were corroded?