On Friday 01 June 2001 03:35, Ivor Blockley wrote:
Hi
I just installed mandrake 7.2 and now dos can't see my fat32 extended
partitions (although linux still sees them). Prior to the mandrake install
my harddrive was configured into 5 partitions - a primary dos fat32
parition (c:) which I had recently formatted (in fact I was so slack I
didn't make it bootable even), and 4 logical fat32 paritions d to g.
Parititons e through to g contained valuable data, but paritition d
was emtpy. So when I installed linux I used diskdrake to delete partition
d and replace it with the required linux paritions. Mandrake works fine
but when I boot up, say using a win98 boot disk, dos can see c:, but no
other hard drive paritions.
Anyone know what happened and how to fix it? I can still obviously access
all my data through linux, but it would be nice to have dos back to normal.
Thanks,
Ivor
Yes, the first extended partition has a type code that says 0x83 which is a
stop sign to windows. It quits looking.
Partitiona are organiized as follows:
On the first sector of the drive bytes
446-461 First primary partition info or extended paqrtition pointer if no
primaries
462-477 2nd primary or extended pointer
478-493 3rd primary or extended pointer
494-509 4th primary or extended pointer
510-511 Signature bytes (end of sector)
Now whichever one points to an extended partition simply points to the first
sector of an extended partition... In that first sector in the same area are
two data fields--one gives size ans starting info about the partition and the
other points to the NEXT extended partition first sector where the pattern of
info is repeated, until all extensions are described.
Windows sees the linux type code and looks no further.
To stop this, and to recover your windows data, figure some good place to put
it. Then use fdisk (linux) to toggle the type of the former D: drive to
FAT32.
You should then be able to see the other drives and recover the data from
them.
Then stomp the whole extended partition scheme and leave the rest of the disk
UNPARTITIONED.
Then reinstall linux, making any windows partitions FIRST. Sorry, but
windows simply does not have the intelligence to look beyond a linux
partition.
Alternatively, you can use GNU/linux to copy the data from the windows
partitions to the first windows partitions, but you can never make those
later partitions accessible to windows, without surgery on the partition
table and reinstalling Mandrake's distribution of GNU/linux.
Civileme
