paritioning for linux and windows on same drive

[bad_knee]

Hello,
I want to split up a drive for use with
linux and windows. I've done this before
by mixing paritioning tools
(winme fdisk, system commander and linux fdisk)

I've had random problems with corrupted data for
about the last year both in linux and in windows.
Usually after copying a lot of files, or installing
a large game. I've been told it's due to mixing
partitioning tools.

What's everyone else using to partition for a
dual-boot setup? I obviously would like to spend
more time using the system than restoring from
backup. :/

thanks
bl8n8r

[Timothy Murphy]

bad_knee wrote:

> I want to split up a drive for use with
> linux and windows. I've done this before
> by mixing paritioning tools
> (winme fdisk, system commander and linux fdisk)
>
> I've had random problems with corrupted data for
> about the last year both in linux and in windows.
> Usually after copying a lot of files, or installing
> a large game. I've been told it's due to mixing
> partitioning tools.

There is a very good program testdisk
which checks your partition-table,
and corrects it if necessary.
Though I think it is a little unlikely
that your problems _are_ due to partitioning errors --
I think fdisk for example would see any such errors at once.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: [email]tim@birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie[/email]
tel: +353-86-233 6090
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland

[Michael C.]

On 22 Sep 2003 10:03:09 -0700, bad_knee <bl8n8r@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> I want to split up a drive for use with
> linux and windows. I've done this before
> by mixing paritioning tools
> (winme fdisk, system commander and linux fdisk)
>
> I've had random problems with corrupted data for
> about the last year both in linux and in windows.
> Usually after copying a lot of files, or installing
> a large game. I've been told it's due to mixing
> partitioning tools.
>

I just got mine redone with dos622, 98se, w2k, and Debian.
(Well Debian's partitions I did using fdisk and inputting the
sectors as I had them before, and editing my /etc/fstab.)

But I used 622's fdisk for the first 32M fat16. I then used
Debian to make a partition ~8G for FreeBSD, then 98 to make
the extended partition, an ~1G logical for 98, and used w2k
to create the NTFS.

One thing to remember is that if you format a 64M partition
in dos, then resize it to 32M, and format it again, depending
on the tools you used you'll get a 64M disk which dos will
happily use. I don't know if that has ever been fixed, but
format only checks the partition table if the format is
invalid. Which leads to the note in man fdisk to the effect
of when resizing dos partitions use dd to blank the beginning
of the partition. such as:

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=2

That's from memory, check it before you use it.

Michael C.
--
[email]mcsuper5@usol.com[/email] [url]http://mcsuper5.freeshell.org/[/url]
Registered Linux User #303915 [url]http://counter.li.org/[/url]