[lug] new hard drive

[John Karns]

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.

The short of it is that in my case anyway, the partition was not required
by the installed W98 to run, so I deleted it.  If your machine came with
bundled apps, you may want to back that up before deleting the contents.


> 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?

----------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                        jkarns at csd.net