Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - RE: [BL] hd problem

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: RE: [BL] hd problem
  • Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 12:13:41 -0500

----- 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
--
_______________________________________________
Find what you are looking for with the Lycos Yellow Pages
http://r.lycos.com/r/yp_emailfooter/http://yellowpages.lycos.com/default.asp?SRC=lycos10





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page