Re-installing W98 without endangering the Linux partitions?

[Bill Freeman]

	I promised a summary.  Here goes.

	I got several responses.

	Jeff Kinz seemed to remember some of the same bad situations
that I vaguely remember, in which windows installs wiped other
partitions.  He suggested a VMWare based solution, which, of course, I
did not try.  Maybe I'll spring for VMWare someday, but I need a much
better reason.  He also stated the fairly obvious: Backup, have Linux
boot media, don't tell the windows installer to break anything, and if
the boot sector is gone use the rescue media to let you run the booter
of choice's install tools.

	Randy Edwards said that you have to work at it to have a problem,
and, indeed, the W98SE installer ignores the Linux partitions when run
his way (below, includes a really good tip).  He notes that the W98SE
installer is going to trash the master boot record, so you need a rescue
CD or boot floppy to be able to re-run GRUB or LILO installers.

	Randy suggests booting to the install CD to the DOS prompt,
doing "format c:/s/v", and copying everything from the CD's /WIN98
directory to a directory of the same name on C:.  (At this point you
can boot from the hard drive to a DOS prompt.)  Now cd to that
directory and run setup.  It now installs from the CABs there, without
needing the CD, which is gratifyingly faster than even a really fast
CD drive.  An added bonus is that it seems to remember that it got
stuff from C:\WIN98, so when you install networking, or a printer
later, it doesn't ask for the CD.  (This does tie up about 122MiB of
your C drive, but given hard drive sizes today...)  It definitely does
not offer to let you repartition in this circumstance.  (The partition
already exists, is marked bootable, is a FAT partition, doesn't have
a Windows installation on it, and you're running from it.)  I didn't
try an install directly from the CD, so I don't know whether it would
have offered to repartition (or just done it), even with the existing
partition, etc.

	John Feole said "me too" about Randy's method.

\begin{Heckle}
	Ben Scott said "me too" and then proceeded to tell us details
far beyond the scope of the question in a language that uses only
English words, but which isn't English.
\end{Heckle}
He mentions the point that while normal MicroSoft install media will
leave the non-FAT partitions alone, some of the vendor supplied CDs
that include all apps bundled with one of their machines may be
willing only to re-initialize the whole drive.  If somebody has one of
those it might be fun to see if theres a WIN98 directory at root
level, and, assuming that you have another way (rescue floppy) to boot
to a dos prompt, whether doing Randy's format, copy, reboot, cd, and
setup, will behave reasonably.

	While everyone agreed that you need to run grub or lilo after
getting Linux booted again, I went another way.  Before I began:

    ~# dd bs=1b count=1 if=/dev/hda of=rh9bootBlock.b

and I used makebootdisk (and tested it) to make a floppy to start my
usual kernel and root (my usual root and /boot are on hdd, which makes
rerunning grub harder than for most folks).  I also changed the
partition type of the FAT partition on hdd to something strange
(fdisk's t command), since otherwise the W98 install wanted to check
it, and I didn't trust the installer.  Then I did Randy's install
routine, updated Windows, etc.  Finally I used the boot floppy to
get into linux, and did:

    ~# dd bs=1b count=1 if=/rh9bootBlock.b of=/dev/hda

	Everything was now back to normal.

							Bill