Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> ----- 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.

I am thinking of not putting Win98 back at all, and switching to FreeDOS.
Have you managed to get FreeDOS emm386 to work with loadlin?  It looked 
complicated.

> > 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 never had problems with it, don't understand.


> > 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.

I did not attempt to write anything to the DOS partition table from linux.
So what might have caused the DOS (hda) partition table to mess up?
I don't mount with any options, just mount /dev/hda1 /hd.  I use this to 
ethernet-copy DOS files between two computers (instead of laplink in DOS).

> 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

Does this mean I am overwriting the hdx (hda) partition table with nulls?
Is there any backup copy of it I could try to access instead, somewhere on 
the disk?  I still need to pick up killmonk and run it.

> 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.

Partition with linux or FreeDOS fdisk, format with DOS format? Is there 
some advantage to linux fdisk even for DOS?  MS DOS fdisk I think will 
only make one partition but FreeDOS makes four.  We have been using 
Partition Magic - does this also mid-level format?

Would DOS fdisk also be able to wipe out the partition table?  Is the 
partition table something near the start of the disk like the boot 
sector?  Linux seems to keep several backup copies of the equivalent.

I was hoping not to have to reinstall Win98 but I do have it on its own 
computer and can drag it out if I need to view a WORD file.  I no longer 
need Win98 for the scanner or CD burner.  Do you know of some way to 
install Win98 so that it will do nothing except run the WORD viewer 
program and print with it?  How small can it be made?  MS seems to keep 
inventing new ways to format documents faster than Antiword or other 
convertors can keep up.  I do NOT want to get into running Windows under 
Samba unless that would somehow be smaller and easier.

> David
> --
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org