[lug] Mounting fat32 way out on partition 8

[Andrew R. Diederich]

I installed Windows XP the other week and I'm still trying to recover a
fat32 partition.  From doing some google searching I'm running into a
semi-common problem, that folks aren't able to mount fat32 partitions in
the extended partition.  

My setup looks kinda like this:
hda1 NTFS (windows xp)
hdb1 fat16 
hdb5 ext2 (boot)
hdb6 reiserfs (/)
hdb7 (something, either another linux or maybe my swap)
hdb8 fat32

The slight bit of history behind this is my windows 95 part crashed and
took some key windows files with it, and I wasn't going to go through the
pain of finding all the drivers again, so I bought XP.  While XP can see
that a fat32 partition exists, it wants to reformat it.  

Of course, it worked fine from win95.

So, I'm trying to use linux (again) to rescue Windows.  I'm trying to
mount with "mount -t vfat /dev/hdb8 /mnt" but I get your standard "wrong
fs type, bad option, bad superblock" error.  

Since I'm pretty sure the XP install nuked the partition I'm willing to do
some risky things to try.  The only real bummer is I never tried mounting
the big (6 gb) fat32 partition before installing XP, so I don't know if it
ever would have worked.

So, if anyone has any ideas, I'm game.

XP: worse things happen in wartime.  It didn't like my new plug & play
modem, and set it to conflict with com2.  I was able to move it to com3
later, so I can get to the Internet again.  The best thing is I can run my
kid's win95-only games, which refused to run under NT or win2k.  The win95
emulator thing works OK.

As for any of it's special MS stuff, well, I'm writing this in Tera Term.
=^)  

Thanks for the help, folks.

--
Andrew Diederich