China DOS Union

My 2k was on drive F. Today I was getting ready to reinstall it, and then came the depressing sequence of events:

format f:/q
dir
Hmm, drive F was gone.

After rebooting I found that F was still there, but the FAT on drive C was completely wrecked.
Even though I was pissed, I still had to keep going. format c:, and that wiped out the Win98 on C too...
So then I started reinstalling.

To save trouble, I installed Win98 first. Everything went smoothly, and I put 98 on drive C.
Then I used ghost to back up 98 (smart move)... and started installing 2k.

Installed from the hard disk, ran \i386\winnt... everything went smoothly. After copying the files it rebooted.
Continued installation... then it said it couldn't find the temporary setup files, and setup ended...

Quit setup and entered 98. I could see the temporary files on C, and osloader had been installed too... damn it.
Tried again, repeated the above steps, but it still said it couldn't find the temporary files.

Switched to booting from CD... first I used a boot CD I burned myself, and it actually said something about ntldr is missing.
I've used it to install systems several times before, never had any problem with it... so I changed to another pirated disc and booted from that. This time
it finally worked. When it got to the partition selection step, I found that the system showed drive C as an “unrecognized or unformatted partition” first.
Really hard to make sense of... anyway, I wanted to install it on F, so I figured I'd just ignore it... but no, the system forced me to
format C first. So the Win98 I had just installed was gone again... installed 2k again... and finally everything was done.

Then I used ghost to restore 98, reinstalled osloader, made a new ghost backup... everything was done. What a hassle.

Also installed a Bluepoint while I was at it, and used PQ to carve out a new partition. Not bad, this time pq didn't mess with me,
went pretty smoothly...

I can't figure it out. What happened today was really strange :-(
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