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.
> 

-- 
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