[lug] new hard drive

[Hugh Brown]

On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 20:16, John Karns wrote:
> On 6 Mar 2002, Hugh Brown said:
> 
> > On my hda (a disk that is dual-booting linux and windows) I have a
> > Hidden Win95 FAT 32 partition that is 2gig.  Originally, this machine
> > came with windows on it.  I reformatted it, gave linux the lion share of
> > the drive and off I went.  The problem is I don't remember creating that
> > partition (though I may have).  What is it usually for and is there
> > anyway that I can find out what is on it?  Can I just reclaim it for
> > linux or would windows break (not that I mind terribly, but it would
> > take a few hours to reinstall windows which I'd prefer not to do)?
> 
> Some OEMs (Compaq for one) set up a 2nd partition with a backup copy of
> MSW on it.  A Presario laptop I bought came with such an animal in place
> of a W98 install CD.  Although not a hidden partition, it had a copy of
> W98 in some sort of compressed form which was installable via a binary
> included with the running copy of W98, and included the installers for the
> application pkgs for several models of Presarios.  [That made no less than
> three copies of W98 eating up the drive space: the running copy, an copy
> contained in .cab files (/windows/options), and the 2nd partition].
> Never mind that if one was in a situation where W98 was not bootable, none
> of the copies would allow one to re-install.  For that, use of the
> "restore CDs"  would be required, which completely re-partition the drive,
> wiping out all existing partitions.


I think what happened is that I left it unpartitioned with the
expectation that I would put one of the bsd's on it and then never got
around to it.  Windows ME probably decided it was best formatted as a
Hidden windows partition.  I nuked it.  I have seen where the compaq
"Restore CD" just reads what's on the D drive (or the extra drive) and
restores the C drive.  Now if the hard drive fails then you have to get
compaq to ship you some other CDs.




> 
> > Also, on the new drive I gave windows a 10gig slice of it for as the
> > game partition.  I used fdisk under linux to create a Win95 FAT32
> > partition and then I formatted it under windows.  Now when I try and
> > mount it as -t vfat, I get
> >
> > mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdb5,
> >        or too many mounted file systems
> >
> > Does the vfat type only support up to a certain size partition?
> 
> Yes, depending on the cluster size.  For FAT32, for 2k clusters, max size
> is 512G.  But of course this is well above the capacity of the average PC
> disk drive, so is probably irrelevant.  For 4k clusters, max is 1024 G.
> (According to some docs which accompany the Ranish partitioning utility)
> 
> You don't mention what version of Windows you're working with - is it by
> any chance an NT derivative, in which case you may have formatted the
> partition as NTFS?  Or perhaps you're booting a kernel without the (v)fat
> support?

It is Windows ME and the vfat support was in the kernel.  I could mount
other vfat partitions just fine.  As I played with it some more, I
booted back into windows to find out that windows didn't recognize it
either (i.e. I lost everything that was on that partition, I hate
windows).  I eventually just reordered partitions on the drive and used
linux to format everything and life is much better.  Now both my kids
and I can play our video games.

Thanks for the help.

Hugh