Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>

> My friend said I should NOT have put Win98 in FAT32 since that is 
> only needed for drives over 2GB and Win98 needs 200MB plus a bit 
> for programs.

Decent advice.

> He also said I should not be using more than one primary DOS partition
> and I am lucky it has worked for me to use four until now, but I don't
> think this is my problem here.

Why is this? Does DOS lack support for multiple primary partitions?
In any case, that should not be a problem for BasicLinux.
 
> I noticed while configuring that the BL2 kernel does NOT support 
> vfat even as a module.  My first non-linux partition on the 
> problematic drive is FAT32 and I probably mounted it in linux.  I 
> never specify -t msdos while mounting FAT16 partitions but BL2 
> seems to identify them okay and just tells me there is no ext2 
> partition.  Maybe I should get into the habit of doing this, since 
> I am guessing that linux screwed up the partition table by trying 
> to mount FAT32 as plain FAT16 (vfat as msdos).  Is there some way 
> to reverse this other than reformatting the whole drive and 
> reinstalling?

Linux doesn't write to the partition table unless you use something
like parted or fdisk. In fact, if you mount with the ro option, it
will not write a single byte to the drive or partition.

A reformat is probably your easiest option for healing the damage.
You need a midlevel format. Boot into the floppy version of BL,
make sure no hard drive partitions are mounted, then run

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdx

Replace x with appropriate drive letter.

You'll then need to partition your disk. You can then format your
partitions and install operating systems. The DOS format only formats
one partition at a time on hard disks, and will not touch the partition
table.

David
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