all I wanted to do was access my windows partition from linux and I've created tons of errors. I was reading up on it and someone it said that there is no support for FAT32 in linux, only FAT. this was ok, I'd just set up a 2gig FAT partition to be an intermediate partition, right? I created the partition and then when I tried to boot into linux BAM error. It said VHS panic root partition \dev\hda5 found hda1 ... <hda5 hda6 hda7> and locked up. ok I thought this might happen because it would shift the partitions up. I then figured out from the boot disk I created when making mandrake I could type linux boot=/dev/hda6 ro (ok maybe some faqs helped out :) ). so this got me back into linux I thought I could just mount my hda5 partition, start emulating windoze apps, and all would be well. well that wasn't the case. I got into linux but I wasn't greeted by that nice gradiant screen with KDE or gnome selection, only that ASCII penguin and the bash prompt. I logged in and remembered that "startx" was used to get into KDE. welp I went into KDE as root and tried to mount my hda5. I used that exploring thing, went into the /dev directory and clicked on hda5. now KDE locked up. great. I used ctrl+alt+backspace to kill it. now I was back at the prompt. I typed mount /dev/hda5 but it didn't find it in etc/bin and some other dir even though I was in /. could anything else possible go wrong? yup. I thought GNOME might give me more luck in getting into my windows partition, but since that gradiant screen went away after I created my windows FAT partition I didn't know how to start it. I went into the gnome directory and found a readme. I was under the impression VI was like edit in DOS. ok I typed VI readme. It displayed ~'s down the screen, and locked up my keyboard! I pressed escape q! because I read somewhere that q! closes it but that didn't work. I couldn't do anything so I pressed ctrl+alt+del. this began to restart my comp, but then it couldn't unmount the root partition! well I just booted back to windows to write this message and I have a feeling my that linux partition's file system has been damaged. alright now I have a few questions. 1) how do I get that gradiant login screen when I boot up back so I can select gnome? 2) how do I access my windows FAT partition (hda5) I created to be the intermediate partition between my FAT32 partition and linux? mount doesn't work. 3) I very much hate booting linux from a floppy, how do I get loadlin to work? I created a dir called linux with loadlin, vmlinuz, initsomething.gz and a bat with loadlin c:\linux\loadlin c:\linux\vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6/ ro in it, rebooted into DOS mode from win, and ran the bat. well I got some weird error. do you guys recommend I reinstall linux? I just have the fresh installed mandrake on my linux partition. well reinstalling would let me create a bootdisk that has /dev/hda6 as root on it, and fix q 1, but I still need to figure out how to access my windows FAT partition and get loadlin to work. I really hope all this trouble I'm going through to get linux set up pays off in linux being worth it. I haven't really been able to play around since I'm getting so many dang errors and problems.. well, as always, thanks in advance for any help and info.
