Hi All, Thank you to Kevin McLauchlan and Robbie Wilson for answering so quickly. I am also grateful that two people gave me solutions with out any scoldings or upbraidings for actually wanting to add a Windows partition to a computer that was already Microsoft free. I am jumping the gun here a little by posting a "solved" email to the list before actually trying it, but the solution seems pretty straightforward. Thank you too to anyone who answers after this is posted. Neal Here was the original problem:
I am giving a Dell Inspiron 3500 laptop to a friend. It currently has SuSE Personal 8.0 on it. She is willing to try it as long as there is a W98 partition on it. So I tried to install W98 from scratch on it and got the message that the drive was damaged and could not be formatted. The same thing happened when I tried to install W2000. Then I couldn't boot the SuSE 8.0 system. I reinstalled SuSe 8.0 easily enough, so I know the drive is okay, but what do I have to do to allow windows to install on it?
Anyone know what I must do to remedy this situation?
Robbie Wilson advised: Try reformatting the harddrive as fat32 and installing win98 and then add suse 8.0. That SHOULD work (-: Have Fun, Robbie Kevin McLauchlan offered a detailed solution: On Thursday 04 July 2002 12:35 pm, KMcLauchlan@chrysalis-its.com wrote:
Had you created a DOS/Windows partition? Or did you let Windows 98 Install just blunder into the horror of a Linux formatted drive? If you don't mind re-installing, just fire up YaST2, ask it to re-partition your drive, and specify a nice DOS partition near the front of the drive (with the remainder allocated to Linux in any proportions that please you). After the dust settles, you should have a DOS partition and a couple (or more) of Linux partitions.
(Linux can live happily and comfortably anywhere, but windoze is picky about its lodgings, fearing to stray from the early tracks. Linux can fake a good DOS partition, but Windows can't fake a Linux partition, even if you ask it nicely.)
Try the Win98 installation again. It should see the DOS partition and regard the rest of the drive as unknown territory. Or, in worst case, it may insist on reformatting it... but you are going to re-install SuSE, so that won't matter.
If that works, then re-install SuSE 8, formatting everything except the DOS/Win drive, and requesting that the loader go in the Master Boot Record. You'll be prompted for the LILO basics, like what order to show the operating systems at boot time, which one is default, etc.
Should just work. :-)
At least, I think that's what I did, time before last.
/kevin