Flirting with diaster (a bad installation experience)
I attempted to install Slink as dual-boot to Win98 on my Dell PII300 last
night, and, I think, narrowly escaped disaster. Here's what I did and what
happened. Maybe someone can tell me where I went wrong. I do very much
want Debian as a second OS on this machine.
With the DOS tool, fdisk, I deleted a little used DOS partition from my 8.4
gb hard drive to provide ~2 gb freespace and rebooted the Slink rescue
floppy into the installation program. As part of the Debian installation, I
divided the hard disk free space into 70 mb linux swap (hda4) and 1843 mb
linux primary (hda3) partitions. I then installed and configured the base
system - uneventfully. I did not select the option 'boot linux directly
from the hard drive' - was I under the correct impression that doing so
would prevent me from booting Win98?
I used dselect to install and configure packages, I configured X.
Everything seemed alright. I did not (and don't how I would) install or
configure LILO. Is that where I went wrong? I don't recall seeing mention
of LILO in the installation dialogs.
I rebooted the machine, thinking it would boot Win98 (and I would have to
(temporarily) boot from the Linux boot floppy to get into Linux). No OS
booted. An error message along the lines of
'Set up cannot continue, invalid partition' appeared.
Perhaps I overreacted, got stupid, or was lucky or unlucky, but I rebooted
from a Win98 rescue disk I had created and used DOS fdisk to delete the two
linux partions to which I had just installed Linux. I then tried a reboot,
and thankfully, my Win98 booted and seems none the worse for the experience.
I'd appreciate any insight anyone might have. It may take a while before I
get the courage to try reinstalling Debian on a dual OS machine.
Thanks for reading and regards,
Andy Krietemeyer
Micanopy, Florida
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