On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 10:17:31AM -0600, Robert Leduc wrote: > > 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? Yep. > > 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? Mostly depends on how old your machine is. If fairly recent vintage, you should be OK. I notice your BIOS is Award from 1998. Check the Award site. Perhaps there are BIOS updates. Perhaps there is documentation to let you know how large a partition you can create. My daughter's system only allowed 8GB partitions until I upgraded her BIOS. > > 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. Press 't' in fdisk to change a partition type. 'L' lists the available types of partitions. Type 'c' is a Win95 Fat32 partition. > > 4) For example, what is the linux command for "formatting" the > drive as FAT32? Check out 'mkdosfs'. You will type something like: mkdosfs -v -F 32 /dev/hdax > > 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. Don't need to worry about the order of the drive assignments. Leave them alon with hda9 in the middle. It will work fine. > > 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? I think that is Partition Magic is a good way to go. Check the docs to make sure it will do what you want. > > 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. > -- _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list