On Friday 23 January 2004 3:03 pm, Basil Chupin wrote:
I am dual booting. I have 2 HDs (hda and hdc) with 1 partition on hda formatted as NTFS with the rest (except for Linux) as FAT32, On hdc I have a Reiserfs partition (data1) with the rest as FAT32.
I now want to reformat at least 3 partions (say 2 on hda and 1 on hdc) as NTFS.
If I altered fstab to reflect the partitions I want to reformat as NTFS file system BEFORE I exited Suse and then formatted them as NTFS would I have a problem in having them correctly recognised when I booted back into Suse? Or would I need to do a pretend run of the partitioner after booting into Suse and read-in the partition table in case the beginning/ending sectors are altered by the reformatting?
Cheers.
-- All Scottish food is based on a dare.
OK, as I read it, you are setting out to repartition and reformat, rather than just reformat. My guideline is always use the operating system for the filesystem type to do the formatting. So for formatting NTFS partitions, use NT, 2000 or XP. But for partitioning use Linux, the partitioner is much more capable. Start with Yast2 > System > Hardware > Partitioner. This will at least keep fstab workable for SUSE. Take care that you don't change the drive letter of any bootable M$ partition [the others can be fixed, but the bootables can cause grief - with NT you can get around this to some extent, but it's better to work out that it is going to happen and investigate first rather than do it and then ask]. When you use the partitioner, you can choose the filesystem type, and there are choices 0x07 for NTFS and 0x0c for FAT32 [IIRC], under 'do not format'. Note that these choices are just labels, as you don't format and note too that you get a more restricted choice of filesystem types under the 'format' option. Make sure to choose ''NTFS' as the filesystem type, even though you do not format, so that the M$ stuff can see the right drive letters - it works this out by ignoring partitions with the wrong filesystem type labels, so it could be important not to leave empty partitions. Once you have done this, you can format the new partitions from NT or whatever. HTH Vince