Re: adding win 95 partition
On 23/10/99 James Ruby wrote:
I have a 20 gb drive with 5 gb for root and 5 gb for user and 128 mb swap
they are all primary partitions.
Now I have a little over 9 gb left, I would like to devide this in half and
make partitions that windows 95 can see and use, can I do this with out
trashing the drive and starting over?
if your careful it might be possible
So far the things I've tried with cfdisk did not work, there are about four
different win 95 fat 32 options.
I am not very familier with cfdisk, its too clumsy for my tastes :)
with regular fdisk you should be able to create a partition for
win95, you cannot make 2 partitions because you can only have 4
primary partitions, and you are using 3 the 4th would have to be an
extended partition which is just a container for additional
partitions, you cannot boot from an extended partition as far as i
know (definitely not win95 at least) so that leaves you with 2
options:
1) just make a 9gb partition for bloat^H^H^H^H^Hwin95
2) create a 9GB extended partition and then create some linux
partition and move one or more of your Linux partitions to the
extended partitions (just not root) then change the old primary linux
partition to a win95 type (im not sure what it prefers I think FAT16)
and make a dos filesystem on it. you can do this with your /usr
partition pretty easy. just mount the new replacement /usr in /mnt
and do a (cd /usr ; tar -cvpf -) | (cd /mnt ; tar -xvpf -) after a
few minutes /usr and /mnt will be identical and you can just go down
to single user mode umount /mnt and /usr and change /etc/fstab to
mount the new /usr instead of the old one, nothing will ever know you
did it.
obviously the second option will give you more of what you want but
is much more work, with more margin for error...
one note when you create a FAT partition with linux utilities you
need to dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/blah (#where blah is your new dos
partition) bs=512 count=10 otherwise the win95 tools that create the
filesystem (probably better to use them then the linux mkdosfs) will
do all sorts of undesirable things.
also make sure to have a good working boot disk that will let your
restore lilo because win95 WILL destroy your current lilo
configuration.
Best Regards,
Ethan Benson
To obtain my PGP key: http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/pgp/
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