I'm trying to find an alternative to part.exe on 98 (as it doesn't work for me). I've tried a lot of things, and haven't been successful so far, so I thought I'd ask the group here.
_What I'm running:_
I've got w2k on my main system, and a laptop that dual boots between Debian-woody and w98 (not SE).
My CF reader is the Zio USB one, and is recognized by both flavors of win, but not linux.
The woody box is running kernel 2.4.12 right now.
I DON'T have the USB nic yet.
I'm writing flash images with Gem Explorer (thanks, Keith).
I've got two CF's: 16M and 64M.
My hope was to make a bootable CF with the 64 that held utilities and an image file, either on the same partition, or not.
_What I've tried:_
1. part.exe - can't seem to see the CF drive on either os. It simply gives a terse error message and that's it. I tried fiddling with the "fool app that it's in MS-DOS" settings for command.com and I've hosed my laptop's w98 (boo).
2. TomsRTBT - a well-liked linux rescue floppy disc. I had hoped to image it to the CF and be able to 'dd' but I can't seem to build a valid partition table AND get the image on there.
3. Debian rescue disc - boots great, but to get it on the flash, I have to burn it as an image, which screws up the partition table, and means that I can't save a jailbait image on there. What I'll try next is to get the rescue.bin image onto the internal flash, and try and get to a shell to run 'dd'.
4. Dskprobe.exe from the W2k CD. This is my latest attempt, and seems to have lots of features. It does SEE the CF drive, but I have had trouble... I WAS able to change the partition type to FAT16 (there are about 4 different FAT16's... which one?) and format, but when I try and "sys" the disc in 98, it says that it can't copy command.com. Copying command.com manually results in a CF that won't boot (IA just hangs). The rest of the DOS files ARE there.
I also tried (like lots of us have) to just copy the 16M image to the 64M device; got the "LI" hang, of course.
Dskprobe.exe DOES write images to volumes, by the way. It's a little scary, because the interface is pretty kludgy, but it worked.
That's pretty much the end of my explorations. Any ideas? Thanks.
