Re: OT: Any way to get Win95 to boot again?

[Brian Stults <bstults@soc.ufl.edu>]

Marc Shapiro wrote:

> I was given a new-to-me, but still ancient box ( Pentium 166 ) with
> Win95 on it.  At the time, windows was booting fine.  I put in a new HD
> (and moved the old disk to hdc) and installed Debian -- after playing
> around with other distros (my old DX486 has never had any other distro
> on it).
>
> Somewhere along the line, Win 95 stopped booting.  All of the files are
> there (io.sys, msdos.sys, windows and windows\system directories, etc.)
> it just wont boot.  Since I don't use anything but linux, now, I never
> did anything about it.  But now I am going back to school (for a C.S.
> degree) and will need to use M$ software and languages.  Since I am a
> stay-at-home dad with a 9 month old georgeous baby girl I would rather
> do my work at home instead of in an on-campus computer lab.  This means
> that I will need to run Windows.  I don't have a boot disk (and my bios
> wont boot from CDROM).  I have tried to get lilo to boot windows, but
> without any luck.  I imagine that the partition boot sector has gotten
> trashed.  Does anyone know of a way that I can get Windows to
> boot,again?
>
> Any help will be appreciated.

You may have inadvertantly removed the "bootable" flag from the dos 
partition.  I think this once prevented me from booting into windows98. 
 As root, run fdisk and print the partition table using the "p" option. 
 If there is not an asterisk next to the dos partition in the "boot" 
column, that may be the problem.  To fix it in fdisk, use the "a" option 
and choose the dos partition as the one to toggle.  Save the partition 
table (with "w") and try booting into win95.

Good luck.

--
Brian J. Stults
Department of Sociology
3219 Turlington
PO Box 117330
Gainesville, Florida 32611-7330
phone:  (352) 392-0265 x286
fax:    (352) 392-6568
e-mail: bstults@soc.ufl.edu