[lug] Mounting fat32 way out on partition 8

[D. Stimits]

"Andrew R. Diederich" wrote:
> 
> 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.

You might be able to work on fixing it with some of the dos tools, e.g.,
mtools I *think* might have some repair functionality (see man mtools,
at the bottom, the "See also" section). My prior experience is that
every time win wanted to fix something on install, it permanently
destroyed any chance of getting the data back, unless it was a linux
partition and you could reflag it and possibly had saved the first 512
bytes via dd. Btw, I sadly understand what you mean about all those
games that refuse to run under NT or 2k, I have a pile of them.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> --
> Andrew Diederich
> 
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