MultiBoot Gag4.3 freezing

Call it naivety or stupidity but my actions have created a dilemma for me.

I downloaded Multibootgag4.3 after seeing it as a possible solution to a posting on this BBS and ??????installed it?????I think......obviously way out of my depth.
Ever since then I have had problems with freezing up.
I am running a dual disk setup..Win 98 and XP Home....with no problems to date except for this.
I realise I have not given much to go on but perhaps enough to get the ball rolling as I want to get Multibootgag4.3 out of the system.

Thanks in advance.
Roy66

 

It is very doubtful that a boot manager would be responsible for freezing problems. But, not impossible, of course. These programs exist on a reserved track of the drive and do not interact with the operating systems (at least, that is our hope).

To uninstall GAG, just boot from the same floppy that you used to install it. You will see the uninstall option there. It returns the default that it erased during installation.

How did you do the dual boot before GAG was installed?

I have used GAG without problems for quite a while on several machines (there are a lot of other good ones, too).

How much RAM do you have installed? I had some problems with both ME and 98 in dual boot setups until I set the max memory usage for them to 512 Mb.

 

Herein possibly lies my problem.

I did not use a floppy I just clicked on one of the files from the zip folder.

Yeh I know.....pretty stupid.

However before I installed I did set a restore point and have gone back and restored at a restore point previous to the Gag installation but it has made no difference.

There must be some method of getting into wherever Gag is on the HD and deleting it.

Thanks
roy66

 

Hard to say what happened when you ran one of those files from Windows. Do you remember which one, and does GAG appear at boot now?

 

Gag does not appear at boot.....never did but I do get a quick flash DOS box which says C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe....

roy66

 

I'm assuming that you probably clicked on the install.bat file. That would be the most logical choice.

After that, you would have been prompted to put a formatted floppy into your drive.

This may be where things went sour. Do you remember if you changed anything at this point from the default, like choosing your hard drive's drive letter instead of the A: floppy letter?

This program is written primarily in Linux with what appears to be some assembly code. After creating the floppy, it would appear empty and unformatted to Windows or DOS. If these same files somehow got themselves placed on your hard drive, you couldn't see them.

Try to recall the exact steps you followed. Put a floppy in your drive and run the install.bat file. If you don't change any of the defaults, it will merely create a floppy boot disk for GAG, and may jog your memory about any changes you may have made.

 

I'm assuming that you probably clicked on the install.bat file. That would be the most logical choice.

After that, you would have been prompted to put a formatted floppy into your drive.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Right to this point...then hit ENTER and watched the loading process, however when I opened the floppy there was nothing on it????????????

 

That is where this is all leading. The file system used for the floppy is not readable by Windows or DOS. It is only readable by the Linux program. The floppy appears empty and incorrectly formatted to Windows. There is nothing there that you can see from the Windows environment.

The bad news is that this may have happened to your hard drive---the actual file system on a portion of the drive may have been altered by the attempt to install GAG to the drive.

This could certainly lead to hangs and other serious problems.

Try running chkdsk /p from the Recovery Console on all your hard drives to see if it picks up any alterations to the disk file structure and possibly repairs it.

If chkdsk reports that it found an error and repaired it, run chkdsk /p again on the drive to be sure the error is not still there.

Are you getting the hangs in all your bootable operating systems or just one?

 

Mystery of mysteries........after being away from the PC for some time upon
returning what should show up on the monitor but the 5 options of GAG
Blew me away it did.

Soooo what did I do of course...chose option 5..uninstall....just hoped it worked.

No doubt you and others have heard of stranger occurrences than this.

At this stage I am left with a PC that upon reboot with both C (XP Home) MASTER and
D(Win98) SLAVE drives connected that says
Prim Master : none......(this should be my Win98 setup as slave)
Primary Slave : 40020mb UDMA 5.......(this is my XP Home setup as master) so as you can see they are being read in reverse that is if it was reading 98 as being there.

The BIOS setup recognizes both HD.......but win 98 won’t come on board now.
I’ve had a pretty good run with XP to date so this is a bit puzzling.

On reboot I still get this rather quick flas of a DOS box saying something about
“System 32\cmd.exe.......not sure what that is all about as it never appeared prior to
this GAG episode.
Have not tried your chkdsk suggestion yet but that will be next in line...HOWEVER if I can't get D (Win98) recognized I will be unable to chkdsk that one.

Thanks ever so much for your time it is greatly appreciated.

Roy66

 

Since it is the BIOS that reads what is master and slave and what IDE channel things are on, I'd recheck the jumpers on those drives to be sure.

And, strange and frightening as it may sound, why not try reinstalling GAG? Read the directions (please) and use the install.bat to create your floppy. Then, when the GAG OS choices window appears, press "S" to set up the drives for booting. Be sure to press "H" from the configuration menu to save all your changes after you make them.

Or, you can choose the option to use GAG from the floppy and make no changes to your hard drive. This would at least allow you to access your operating systems without fooling around with changing the boot configurations within the OS's themselves.