Partition confusion

[jb]

I'm no expert, but there should be a /boot partition of at least 75 meg
up to 100 meg. In any case you probably have to repartition the whole
drive back to fat32 to re-install Windows.Then partition as you wish
when installing your Linux flavor.
JB

On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 00:02, Michael Brown wrote:
> Greetings All,
> 
> I recently installed a new 200GB hard drive in my PC. Previously, I had
> 2 40GB drives. One partitioned for Windows ME and one partitioned for
> Linux (Mandrake/Redhat, whatever the flavor of the week happened to be).
> This dual boot system worked great.
> 
> The problem now is I can't seem to get the dual boot to work correctly
> with a single hard drive.
> 
> I have tried several different ways to partition the new drive. I have
> been able to install windows and get it setup fine. Then I setup Linux
> and all goes well until I have to reboot into windows. Currently,
> windows reports an registry error and does not boot not even in safe
> mode. Previously, I booted to the startup disk and ran scanreg then it
> reports several missing files and instructs me to reinstall windows.
> 
> I posted the output of fdisk /dev/hde below:
> 
>    Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
> /dev/hde1   *         1       608   4883728+   c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA) C:
> /dev/hde2           609      2432  14651280    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA) D:
> /dev/hde3          2433      7722  42491925   85  Linux extended
> /dev/hde4          7723     24321 133331467+  83  Linux /archive
> /dev/hde5          2433      2675   1951866   83  Linux /
> /dev/hde6          2676      2736    489951   82  Linux swap
> /dev/hde7          2737      3952   9767488+  83  Linux /usr
> /dev/hde8          3953      5168   9767488+  83  Linux /var
> /dev/hde9          5169      7600  19535008+  83  Linux /home
> /dev/hde10         7601      7722    979933+  83  Linux /tmp
> 
> I did use cfdisk to setup this partition scheme. I also ran the command
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1 on hde1 and hde2 per man
> fdisk. cfdisk originally setup hde3 as type f (win95 ext'd) which caused
> windows to "see" a third partition. But, I was able to boot back and
> forth to Linux and windows until fsck complained of errors on hde4 and
> they were too numerous to repair so I formated the partition again (it
> was blank). Then windows could not boot.
> 
> Changing hde3 to type 85 (Linux extended) cured the ghost partition
> under windows after reformatting C: again.
> 
> I should also note that during the current Mandrake 9.2 install lilo
> found 2 windows installations. I did delete the windows2 option. But now
> while Mandrake boots fine windows does not.
> 
> Is this a partitioning issue or perhaps do I need to switch the bootable
> flag from hde1 to hde5?
> 
> I am hoping there is a simple solution without the need to repartition,
> format, reinstall, etc. (again!) But, if I must, I will as long as I
> know how to get it right this time.
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
> 
> Michael Brown