Can Win98 screw up my Linux?

[Greg Kedrovsky]

Hey, guys. I have a weird deal going on with my dual-boot machine. 

After working in my Win98 partition, when I boot back into Linux, Redhat
hoses my /etc/fstab, and it looks like it's trying to mount my 2 cdrom
drives as ide and scsi. It adds two lines to my fstab for cdrom2 and
cdrom3, and installs 2 symlinks: cdrom2->hdc cdrom3->hdd.

I have Win98 in one partition and Redhat 8.0 in another. Same physical
harddrive. I have 2 cdrom drives: 
1. (cdrom) DVD/CD-ROM
2. (cdrom1) CD-RW

They are ide (of course) and installed as ide when RH did it's thing. I
later changed 'em to scsi emulation in order to run the burner.
X-CD-Roasted asked that my reader (cdrom) also be under scsi emulation,
so what did I care. I modified modules.conf, grub.conf, and my symlinks
(rm the hdc and hdd; ln -s to scd0 and scd1).

Everything works like a charm until I boot into Win98 and do some work.
Booting back into Linux, I get a "FAILED" messages after modules
dependencies are resolved (?), during the mounting of my fstab (it's
adding the 2 extra lines and establish the 2 unnecessary symlinks), and
right before kudzu goes to work.

To fix it, I gotta vi fstab, delete the 2 extra lines, remove the two
sylinks to hdc and hdd, and then reestablish the links to scd0 and 1. 

I noticed this first when I was using PowerPoint and accessing the
floppy (for weekly presentations). Yesterday it did it when I did some
work in Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks MX. (All in Win98SE.)

Anyone have any idea why this is going on, and maybe how I can fix it?
It's not damaging anything, but it's a pain to have fix what Redhat
"fixed" on boot up 2 or 3 times each week.

Thanks!
-Greg

-- 
Desktop Idiot Running Red Hat 8.0 Linux.
http://www.greg-and-sue.com/screenshot.jpg