Hi all,

I would be most grateful for any help with this as I know just
enough to be truly dangerous.  I'll try to be brief but I have a
number of questions.  I have a dual boot RedHat Linux 7.2 / Win98
system. It is a long story, but I am currently left with an area
of unpartitioned space in the "middle" of my hard drive. I'd like
to fill at least part of it with a FAT32 partition readable by
both systems.

The installation guide, being a bit useless, simply says to use
fdisk.  Possibly useful machine-specific info is at the bottom of
this message.  My questions are:

1)  The new partition need not be bootable; can I ignore this
1024 cylinder limit thing then?

2)  Does my version of Win98 or my bios place restrictions on the
size of the partition I can create?  Where would I look to find
an answer?

3) I tentatively tried to use RH's fdisk to create a new
partition but didn't save the partition table.  I couldn't see
how to make it of type "Win95 VFAT" rather than of type "Linux".  
Should this be a worry or does this change after somehow
formatting the new partition?  Maybe what I need is a rough
outline of which commands I need to consider executing?  Note, RH
7.2 doesn't seem to ship with cfdisk, more's the pity.

4) For example, what is the linux command for "formatting" the
drive as FAT32?

5) When I create this new partition, the linux drive assignments
hda1 -- hda9 or so won't be in order based on the cylinders they
occupy.  I can reorder this using fdisk.  Should I?  If so, I
realize I will have to change my /etc/fstab to reflect the new
numbering.  Are there any other places I'd need to change things?
I use grub as a boot loader; since /boot and / won't move I
assume it will still work regardless.

6) My hope is that if I ever need to increase the size of /, I
could use partition magic to reduce the size of the new windows
partition and then do a linux reinstall and create a new, larger
/ (likely to occur only in a future upgrade of the operating
system from cdrom).  I only have partition magic ver 4, but would
upgrade to 5 if that is necessary.  Would this work or is this a
bad idea?  People tend to avoid making promises about fips, but
would fips be a better alternative?

Thanks very much for any help on any of the above.

Rob "I'm not a systems administrator, I just play one at home" Leduc
----------
Award bios version 4.51 copywrite 1998
Win98 version 4.something, RedHat Linux 7.2.

The bios reports the hard drive is working in LBA mode.

Linux fdisk reports the partition table as

disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2055 cylinders 
Units = cylinders of 16065*512 bytes 

  Device   Boot  Start   End    Blocks   Id    System 

  /dev/hda1 *    1       268     215678+  b    Win95 FAT32 

  /dev/hda2      269     2055  14354077+  5    Extended 

  /dev/hda5      269      274     48132  83    Linux (my /boot) 

  /dev/hda6      275      835   4506201  83    Linux (my / ) 

  /dev/hda7     1415     1447    265041  82    Linux swap 

  /dev/hda8     1448     2055   4883728+ 83    Linux (my /home) 


It is perhaps not too late to consider a totally different partitioning
scheme, except that I'd like to keep hda1 and hda8 from getting trashed.