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.