Re: Problem with hard drive and partitions

From: Michael C. (mcsuper5_at_usol.com)
Date: 12/20/03 

Date: 20 Dec 2003 22:25:04 GMT

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 19:44:32 +0000,
MikeyD <m_donaghy50@hotmail.com> wrote:
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> > I installed Linux (Mandrake 8.0) using the free space in my windows
> > partition. The problem is that I cannot see a drive unit assigned to the
> > Linux partition from Windows. Windows thinks that all the space in the
> > hard drive is available to it, but this is not true.
> >
>
> I think it may think that the whole thing should be a fat partition. You may
> have to either shrink it with parted or reformat if that's the case. You
> can try and salvage as much as possible from your linux partition but
> you'll probably have to reformat that too.

If the disk was defraged first before changing the partitions and
windows hasn't been writing to the disk the linux partition may be fine.
The fdisk man page has a warning that MS format doesn't get its size
from the partition table unless the first sector of the partition is
zeroed. I've never used parted, so I don't know if it modifies the FAT.

Assuming you've made a backup of your windows partition:

>From linux

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1

fsck /dev/hda5

If you have more than a small number of errors you might want to
reinstall linux to be safe.

>From 98

format c: /s

then restore your backup.

You'll need to use a rescue disk or boot floppy to start linux and
reinstall grub/lilo.

Michael C. 

-- 
mcsuper5@usol.com http://mcsuper5.freeshell.org/
Registered Linux User #303915 http://counter.li.org/

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