Compaq Deskpro 2000 win98 issue

[Hugh Esco]

Hello:  

And thanks for a usually rock-solid product.  

I am Hugh Esco, with RCK Computer Consultants in Nelson BC;
<address@hidden>.

I'm rebuilding a client's Compaq Deskpro 2000 (133mhz), to
dual boot her legacy win98 system with Debian Woody.

On a known working machine, the grub boot floppies seem to work,
allowing me to use the grub menu to choose an OS.

On her Compaq, the grub boot floopy permits me to boot (hd1,0)
(the Debian installation), or, if I disconnect /dev/hdb,
then to boot the win98 system at (hd0,0).

However, no combination I've tried of mapping and hiding
has any impact on my being able to find and boot the windows
installation if both disks are attached to the IDE cable.

After working at this for a while, grub started reporting that
it could not discern the file system on (hd1,0).  Taking that
disk back to a known working machine, booting off knoppix and
using cfdisk reports that the boot partition was formatted using
the ameoba filesystem (which I had not previously heard of).
After unsuccessful attempts to repair the boot partition,
I wiped the hard drive clean and rebuilt the Debian system.

The only thing I haven't tried is making the win98 disk /hdb, 
as I heard that the os doesn't like that.  

Now I'm back in the Compaq, observing the same symptoms reported
above which were common to the other installation.

I read somewhere that these early Compaqs used the hard drive
to store some of their BIOS data.  Not understanding more about
this has made me reluctant to try installing grub on the mbr of
(hd0).

/dev/hda1       windows C
/dev/hda2       compaq restore partition 
/dev/hda3       windows D

/dev/hdb1       /boot
/dev/hdb2       /
/dev/hdb3       swap 
/dev/hdb5       /usr 
        etc., etc., etc. 

All clues and ideas are appreciated.  

Thanks for your work.  
-- Hugh 

--
Hugh Esco 
address@hidden
RCK Computer Services 
http://reclaimedcomputers.ca/