CMOS battery died; now even BootMagic 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

 

[edfair]

How about a boot with floppy, then get to the C:btmagic.pq directory and run the bmcfg to activate.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[torandson]

edfair,
Thanks, I'll look into that.

But I have my reservations ... I forgot to mention that the boot error message I was getting was "sector not found" or something like that. That is, there appears to be a missing drive sector, maybe the boot sector?

Might the BIOS, after the new battery was installed (which fact it clearly recognized), have tried to create or created a boot sector that somehow got hosed? Or is just inappropriate after having installed BootMagic?

Or perhaps when the CMOS checksum error first showed up, the BIOS did something nasty to the drive?

Why would PQBoot (running from the rescue floppy) not be able to boot to the Linux GRUB bootloader on the second primary partition when I selected it from the menu? Oh, maybe GRUB looked for a path back to Win 98 to display its own menu and crashed on the same failure that the Win98 selection did? Could the BIOS have hosed the boot sectors on all three primary partitions?

I'll have to back up the drive first before I can try anything, lest I just make things worse till I know what's what.

NON-RHETORICAL QUESTION: Is there a way to stop the scrolling of a dir command with a keypress? I use a pipe to MORE on a full DOS installation, but that command does not appear to be part of my DOS boot floppy.

--torandson

 

[wolluf]

NON-RHETORICAL QUESTION - doesn't /p work?

btw - bios shouldn't be doing anything to the drive - it reads info to tell it where to pass control - shouldn't write any.

Is it possible to boot the XP partition from a boot floppy (ie, with ntldr, ntdetect.com and a suitable boot.ini file)?

 

[edfair]

[CTRL] & [CTRL][Q] are the keyboard commands, can't remember which is which. But Wolluf's /p should work.
Does your BIOS have a drive identification section? That is helpful for use setting drives up after the battery dies.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[torandson]

edfair, wolluf,

Does your BIOS have a drive identification section? That is helpful for use setting drives up after the battery dies.

Yes, it is set to AUTO. This is what it was set to when the 6GB original drive was in the machine. After I copied the Win98 system to C on an 80GB drive, I don't recall changing that. I wonder if changing this to LARGE or CHS would help (or spray the drive with messy bits and render it useless!).

That's why I need to make a backup of the drive first. Can't do that till Thursday.

I think I have an XP boot floppy around here somewhere, I have to look. One possible snag, though. XP is on an NTFS C:\ partition that is hidden at power-up. Boot Magic took care of that, running on the Win98 FAT32 C:\ partition. Somehow, shutting down XP restored the system to a bootable
configuration again, though I don't remember how I did that just now. I know I had to do some clever file and partition management when I set this system up for multi-boot, using boot floppies and file copies until the whole process was configured on the HDD. (i.e. at one point, with all the OSs installed, it would only boot to XP. Or it would only boot to Win98/Linux. I had to use boot floppies, file copying and editing to get it configured. Hmmm, I should have written down the procedure.)

The thing that bothers me, though, is this "sector not found" message. What does this indicate?

--torandson

 

[edfair]

It usually means that the hard drive has lost address information on a sector. But since there are ID issues it can possibly indicate other than a hardware problem.

Some BIOSs have an additional setup key that allows you to do a scan of IDE devices to see what you have connected and what the settings will be if you use the different drive type selections. That was what I was suggesting.

While you are sorting this out I would suggest that you keep notes of the steps you take. Trying to remember a 3 or 4 hour sequence of setup steps is hard unless you do it often.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[wolluf]

Just backtracking - when did you move from the 6GB to 80GB drive? Before the dead battery? - ie, are we looking at 2 changes here or did you have a working 80Gb drive? (was wondering if PM had screwed up when doing the copy).

If you put this:-

http://www.lpacomputers.telinco.co.uk/PD.zip

on a win98 boot floppy and run it, you can see and change the status of the partitions - so, for example you could make sure XP partition is not hidden and active before trying to boot from boot floppy I suggested.

PS. My preference for boot manager is

http://www.boot-us.com,

always installing it to floppy so I never risk upsetting my hard drives! Never had a serious problem in 6 years.