CMOS battery died, BootMagic rescue floppy not helping!

[torandson]

Hi,
I have a triple-boot system which used to run Win98, WinXP, and Linux.

BootMagic was on FAT32 C along with Win98. Linux boot partition above that and hidden NTFS C above that. Data D and Linux root above those.

Once upon a time, I booted into BootMagic and selected an OS. If I went to 98, it booted right into the default OS on the visible C partition. If Linux, it booted to the visible Linux boot partition, gave me a GRUB menu that provided the option of going back to Win98 or on to Linux. If XP, it hid the FAT32 C and unhid the NTFS C and booted to XP.

IIRC, I had set up the Boot Magic with Win98 and Linux first, and then had to do some clever boot floppy starts, boot file manipulation in the root directory, and hide/unhide gymnastics to add XP to the BootMagic menu. But it all worked fine for many years.

Then the CMOS battery died.

Now, with a new CMOS battery installed and BIOS restored to previous settings (I think), it will not boot.

Sadly, the BootMagic rescue disk(s) I made when I set this up do not work either. I boot to a PQBoot menu which offers all three OSs, but when I select any one of them, I restart. I see that the BootMagic rescue floppies have 'autoexec.bat' and 'autoexec2.bat' on them. I don't see a 'boot.ini' though. The one with the most recent date also has a mousi.ini file that the other does not have. Presumably, I made that one after adding XP to the BootMagic menu.

Restarting again without the rescue floppy after running it gave me a prompt asking me if I wanted to start with or without the Original OS CD support. I selected 'without' since I did not want to write to the HDD just yet. It restarted agin after a valiant, but blind and silent effort.

My first thought was that the BIOS was using a different disk access method (it is set to AUTO now, but I wonder if I had set it to Large before? The original HDD was 6GB but I replaced it with an 80GB drive and copied the old OS to it using Partition Magic.)

Concerned that any write operation with a misconfigured BIOS could wreck the HDD, I used a DOS boot floppy to verify that I could see files and folders on the C partition, but have not knowingly written to the drive.

I know my first order of business now is to copy the whole drive to another drive before doing anything else.

Then what?

Any suggestions?

I have a utility that lets me look at a drive sector-by-sector, if I want to. I have an old Ghost image of C I copied from D to an external drive, but I'm not sure I trust using it before making a bakup copy of the whole drive.

Could someone familiar with the innards of BootMagic please offer some insights?

Thanks in advance.

--torandson

 

[stduc]

The CMOS battery dying shouldn't have effected the boot once you replaced it and re-set the BIOS.

I suspect your BIOS is not set up as it once was. Specifically check that the boot sequence is correct. Hopefully bootmagic recovery attempts have not messed anything up.

Once you have it working you might care to read this FAQ and record your BIOS settings easily for future reference.

faq602-6254

 

[torandson]

stduc,

Thanks, that's what I had thought, too.

I had copied settings and restored them as written on my filecabineted notes. Only, I had originally recorded them before replacing the 6GB drive with an 80GB drive, and wonder if the new drive had taken a different meaning from "AUTO" (i.e. Large or CHS?) than what is now meant by "AUTO".

But I booted to DOS with a Win98 DOS recovery disk and read a directory of C:\, so there are files and folders there (including one called "C:\WINDOWS\"), and the BIOS is giving me access to them, so that suggests that BIOS sector addressing is correct (but I don't know enough to say).

I get an error that says "sector not found" when I try to boot, though. Note that it doesn't say "file not found," but "sector."

I wonder if the "CMOS checksum error" I got when the battery failed was accompanied by something nasty happening to the drive?

Does anyone know what files BootMagic should have put on the drive when it was first installed to handle the multi-boot configuration? Can anyone explain the usual boot process when this program controls that? What should I be looking for here?

Thanks,

--torandson

 

[stduc]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

After much thought.

I haven't used Bootmagic for years. But it never let me down. So I don't feel able to advise re Bootmagic other than saying I think I would have said yes to CD support.

I wanted to start with or without the Original OS CD support.

I would set the BIOS to Large (LBA) I suspect that is why you are getting a sector error. LBA is required on older BIOS's for large 80Gb disks.

If that fails - I would re-set the BIOS and try one more time.

Once you get the O/S's booting again I would run thorough disk checks to verify disk and data integrity in case the failed boots have scrambled anything.