On Sun, 27 Jul 2003, Jerry Feldman wrote:
When I embarked on my project to install 8.2 entirely from FTP, I set up my partitions as follows, adjusted from their prior arrangement:
HDA1 -- a 2-gig Windows partition for my brother. HDA5 -- my 256-meg swap partition. HDA6 -- a 3-gig SuSE 8.1 partition, from which I was WGetting 8.2. HDA7 -- the 7-gig partition I was downloading into.
Now that the system's all installed and I've switched my installation source over to FTP, I've gone ahead and gotten rid of the contents of HDA7 so I can store downloads in it. However, it occured to me that it'd be handy to make it a DOS partition so my brother can use it too. Unfortunately, if I partition it as a DOS partition, Windows can see HDA6 too and tries to
Scandisk it, which I imagine would be a bad thing if I let it.
So, I guess my question is: is it possible for me to make this partition a DOS partition without Windows doing bad things to SuSE? If not, is it possible to set it up in some other way so that both OSes can access it as storage space? As said before, Windows cannot read native Linux partition types. Why not split HDA7 into 2 partitions. One for Linux exclusive use and one for Windows. That partion could be easily shared. (I would set it up as a Windows FAT32). Another solution is to get rid of WIndows altogether and force your brother to use Linux :-)
1. Careful - FAT32 will not work with Windows 3.1, NT (3.5 or 4.0) or with some versions of Windows 95. Windows 98 and 2000 and later will be fine. Configure hda7 as a VFAT in Linux. Use FAT16 (also as a VFAT) if you need to be compatible with ancient Windows and DOS. 2. I think Fred still does not know why Windows sees HDA6 and wants to scandisk it. I agree that scandisk of hda6 might be a bad thing. Fred - if you post the output from fdisk -l it may help us. Also if you can quote what Scandisk sees (though I am no scandisk expert.) David