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What did you mean by "seemingly random partitions"?...
As far as the incomplete installations, as acidspectrum said, you may have a damaged HDD, although any windows OS is supposed to scan the drive BEFORE it attempts installation, so it shouldn't even let you start to do it. (That's how W98se operates, anyway). If the error message that you recieve says, "non system disk or disk error" you may be looking at a bad HDD or a dead BIOS...or maybe just a loose signal connection...
Anyways...keep puttering around with it and see what you can figure out, one OS at a time...
Ouroboros
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The thing is... I can install Linux Mandrake 7.1 on it no problem!
But anything else fails miserably when it comes to rebooting during or after setup!
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You might want to start all over again, wipe out the HD, set up the partitions, then install linux and use Grub as your loader. . .
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I can do that, but I want to put 2000 on it for a while to test out something...
I guess I'll just have to leave it as it is.
Can GRUB (or even LILO) boot NTFS partitions (Win2K)?
Last time I tried it kept *****ing up my Windows installation cos it wouldn't boot an NTFS partition properly...
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you could have a boot virus which has corrupted your MBR...or you just have a corrupted MBR...this could cause these symptoms
check out recovery console commands...
http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/I...leID=8957&pg=2
fixboot. The Fixboot command can save you from disasters such as inadvertently installing NT or Windows 9x after you've installed Win2K Pro—in which case you can't boot Win2K Pro. Fixboot writes a new boot sector that makes the drive bootable and takes one argument—the drive letter to run on. For example,
fixboot c:
writes a new boot sector on the C drive.
Fixmbr. The Fixmbr command attempts to fix the boot partition's Master Boot Record (MBR) and might help you resolve the problem when the system refuses to boot. The command takes one argument—the name of the device that needs a new MBR. If you leave the name blank, Fixmbr will write the new MBR to the default boot device (usually your C drive).
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Use a low-level utility like norton diskedit
or debug.exe to completely zero out the
Master Boot Record.
After that, it will be a virgin hard drive again.
Install the OS of your choice
:cool:
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Yeah. . . grub doesn't have problems w/ NTFS, as far as I know, you might just be having problems b/c your tryin' to install windows after you've got Linux on the box. Windows OS's are picky, they always wanna be first, territorial pissings, they gotta leak all over the MBR. Linux is real easy going though, works well around a windows install and it'll set up grub w/ no problems if you've already got the NTFS partition in place.
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I've had Linux and Windows 9x working well on the same machine, and I've also managwed a triple boot with Linux, 98 AND 2000... But only because LILO/GRUB boot the 9x partition, which is FAT32, and the NT Boot Loader takes over from there. So the LILO entries are Linux and Windows, and the NT Boot Loader then takes over and allows you to select Windows 98 and Windows 2000 Professional.
That is the only way I've managed to get Linux to coexist with 2k.
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Your reboot problem almost sounds like you are not installing Windows on the first primary partition. You can have 4 primary partions, but only 1 active primary partion. Either you are putting Windows on the wrong partion, or you have have a different partion set as active. Maybe not, but its a thought.
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If I had a partition program that would see the full drive (FDISK only gives me 520MB of it) and that has advanced options like setting active partitions (enither 2000s or Linux Mandrake's in-setup partitioner allow that, as far as I know) I'd be able to try that, unfortunately I don't. I'm trying to acquire a copy of Partition Magic in the hope that I'll be able to do something useful with it.
