Hi. My PC was set up as a dual b

[IncubusDesigns]

Hi.

My PC was set up as a dual booting win98/win2k machine. After lots of problems with win2k I removed it.

Problem is, I still get the 'dual boot' menu appearing whenever I start the machine - If I don't select the win98 option in time the machine hangs as it can't find win2k any more... How do I get rid of the menu and make sure I boot into win98?

Any help appreciated.



After removing Win2k from my win98/win2k

 

[IncubusDesigns]

haha. after poking around for a while, I guessed the boot menu was something to do with boot.ini

I renamed boot.ini as oldboot.ini and now the PC won't boot at all.

Stupidly I didn't note where boot.ini was, so I can't find it.

I can boot up with a floppy to get to dos. Any ideas where I can find my original boot.ini?

 

[Snickle]

Boot to a Win98 floppy disk for your version [98 or 98SE]
and at the A: prompt type: fdisk /mbr which should kill the Win2000 boot process and allow only the Win98 boot up. Your drives/partitions are all FAT32, aren't they? Win98 can't see/work with NTFS formatting.

 

[IncubusDesigns]

yes, all Fat32.

tried fdisk /mbr and still get the message Windows 2000 could not start etc etc.

I haven't got win2k, I don't want win2k!! Someone please help.

 

[IncubusDesigns]

Aaargh. Can't believe how stupid I was being.

of course the oldboot.ini was still a hidden read only file!

a quick ATTRIB OLDBOOT.INI -s -h -r
followed by
RENAME OLDBOOT.INI BOOT.INI

has now got my system back to it's normal dual-boot self.

However, I'm now back to the original problem. How the hell do I get rid of the dualboot menu and just go straight into Win98?

 

[wolluf]

You could edit the boot.ini so the win98 entry is the default - but if you're really sticking with win98 (why, I ask myself - win2k is so much better), best thing is to re-stablish the win98 boot sector. As you can actually get into win98 - save the msdos.sys file in the root of C: somewhere else (eg, C:\windows\temp). Then from a dos box, type sys C: (I think you can do this from dos box - normally from dos prompt after booting from win98 boot floppy - I'm a bit rusty on 98 as only use it occasionally now - abandoned it 3 years ago because of all the freezing, unsolicited rebooting, blue screens etc) - this will make your C: (98) drive bootable. Now copy the msdos.sys file you saved back over the minimal one which has been written to root of C: (this will let it boot into windows rather than aos prompt). When you next reboot, it should just boot normally. You can remove boot.ini & ntldr & ntdetect.com & any arc*.* files in root of C: - all 2k related.

Berton

Fdisk /mbr just rewrites (some of - it doesn't touch the partition table) the master boot record - it won't affect the boot process in this situation. Its the boot sector of the first (well active - which is first in this case) partition that matters. After win2k installs it has a win2k boot sector - need to put a win98 boot sector back in place, which sys C: does.