hi pw
as a follow up to my post #reply-15910426 , in which i mentioned, "now i am playing around in win98se where i have 2 rescue disks (1 jaz and 1 floppy), and i am about to re- create and test them as well".....
well, i am very glad that our posting on this subject prompted me to go back in and recreate and test these disks!
why?
because the zip (or in my case, the jaz) rescue set would not boot my computer! this concerned me and puzzled me too, in that i have used this set previously to recover from a problem with the master boot record. and now, here i am with a re-created zip rescue set that failed to boot my pc into win98se.
so the first thing i did was to create the basic (not zip) rescue disks (7 floppies) and test them. they booted the pc just fine.
now i wanted to get the zip rescue disks working right. i got to thinking that perhaps the problem was in the dual booting, so i looked through the symantec rescue info and read that indeed, more than one os can cause the zip rescue set to not function properly. (the basic floppy disks had no prob with the dual boot set up.)
this then called for modifying the floppy (remember, there's one floppy and one jaz disk in the zip rescue set). i started win98se, inserted the floppy boot disk and from a DOS prompt typed SYS A: and pressed enter. per the symantec instructions, this transfers the os to the rescue boot disk. i got a message that said "could not copy command.com onto the target disk", but i went ahead with it anyway and shut down, then rebooted with both the jaz disk and floppy disk in their respective drives.
it worked! that is, at least i got to the symantec/iomega zip rescue screen, where i was advised to restart the pc one more time with the disks still in place if the reboot failed to start windows. i did that and sure enough, i got a prompt asking if i wanted to boot into safe mode to start windows from the norton zip rescue disks. at that point, because i had no emergency, i knew i was good and could shut down.
i was happy to have encountered the difficulty now, when i was not experiencing an emergency. it was cool because of what i had to do in DOS to modify the boot disk to get the zip rescue set to work.... something that was new to me and was a learning opportunity.
the fewer complications i have waiting in the wings when the 'emergency' pays me a visit, the better my chances of recovery will be.
:)
mark |
