Hello,

I made a mistake, I didn't read the manual carefully, and installed RH7.1, now only linux boots up, and I think I've lost everything else.

When I booted using a win98 floppy, and ran fdisk to see partition information, it said

1) 55 mb disk (active partion)
2) 4056 mb disk (extended partition)

And I couldn't set 2) as active partition, it said "cannot set 2) as active partition"

Any suggestions ?

Thanks,
Rgds,
A.A

what type of install did you do when installing RH 7.1?
and how large is your hard drive?

Server Class, trickykid.
And my Hard Disk is 4 GB.

Sounds to me it would take your hard drive, rewrite it with its own partitions and install Linux. Windows is Gone....

Tip: When installing Linux, and you want a dual boot, you always want to customize the install. The others will erase and create what it needs fit to install Linux, like server or workstation... etc.

And my precious Data also, I presume.

Well, let's start up a new country up.

Yep,

Everything.....is gone, unless you made backups. Which it doesn't sound as if you did. oops.... We all make mistakes though. Trust me, I have my share of them myself.

Look at it this way though, you have a kick a** OS now instead of Windows.

Is it for sure that everything is gone?

I have had a similar experience, but was able to recover by booting to DOS with a startup floppy and running 'fdisk /mbr', which installed a clean MBR.

Then, I was able to see my Windows stuff again.

I guess I would look at the fdisk info and make sure that there is no vfat, fat or multifat stuff left.

If you don't take the right steps, Linux will change your Master Boot Record so that Linux is the OS that gets booted.
You might try typing "windows" when the "linux" prompt shows up on your screen during the boot process.

Hope this helps -- I'm a linux newbie.

I'm pretty sure all is lost. Mainly because partition types are different. Linux repartitioned the drive and formatted it before installing.

Remember, don't shoot the messenger.