I just installed Mandrake 9.0 a few days ago. I have 2 HDs, hda (30Gb) and hdb (80Gb). Mandrake is installed on hda beyond the 1024 cylinder boundary, in between 2 logical FAT32 partitions. Primary partition on hda is Windows XP Pro. I made the linux partitions with Partition Magic 8. Just today morning after leaving Linux on all night for the first time I rebooted into XP to find out that my hdb1 partition is gone from XP (?!?!?!) I can see the other 2 partitions on hdb just fine. Partition Magic cant help because it tells me that "Disk 2 (hdb) appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry (128h 63s)" It's always been like this.

I can see hdb1 in Linux just fine but in Windows it doesnt have a letter assigned to it anymore for some reason. WinXP Device Manager / Disk Drives / Volumes sees the partition and the label but doesnt have a letter assigned to it.

Anyone have an idea as to why this happened and how I could fix it? I know I should repartition this drive with new geometry as PMagic8 says I should but I really have nowhere to back up the 70Gb that are sitting on the drive. PLEASE HELP!!!!!!

From what little I know about Mandrake, I believe it creates a root partition, a usr partition and a swap partition. So it is possible that when you installed Mandrake, your root partition was created on hda and your /usr and swap partions on hdb. If that is the case, they will not show up in Windows but they should show up in PM8, one as a linux swap partition and one as a linux ext2 or ext3 partition but it will not allow you to assign a drive letter because it is not a MS supporte file system. Don't forget PM8 is a windows based program for creating and manipulating FAT, FAT32 and NTFS partitions. It will let you create Linux partitions but that's all it will let you do.
So, first thing to check is, in PM8 what is the file system of the 'missing' partition. If it is ext2, ext3 or linux swap thats fine. If it is FAT32 or NTFS, highlight the partition, right click and in 'advanced' set the partition to 'active'

Jim

Mandrake 9 allows the user to determine what partitions are created and where they are put. It will only demand two: root (/) and a swap partition.

Where did you put these? Did you install anything on the Windows drive? You didn't give us much to wrok with here--you described what you did only as it related to hda, then said you have a problem with hdb.

If you don't know what happened there, open a shell terminal in Mandrake and type this:

su -
<root password>
fdisk -l


This should print out what everyone of your partitions. Note the -l after fdisk is a lowercase L. You could also try sfdisk or cfdisk. If you have either of those, it will give you more information.

Specifically, what you are looking for is what kind of file it is. You think it should be FAT32. Since Linux sees it and Windows doesn't, my guess is fdisk (or sfdisk or cfdisk) will tell you otherwise.

Thanks for your replies. I ran fdisk -l and for the specific partition that I couldnt see under XP it said it is "Hidden Win95 FAT32 (LBA)". I didnt install anything on this drive and it is all FAT32. I presume I just have to unhide it but how can I do this considering that PM8 will not let me do anything to this drive because of the incorrect drive geometry. Is there any way to do this in fdisk? Naturally, I dont want to lose any data thats on this drive so if the solution involves any risk I'd rather find a way to back up the 80Gb drive and repartition it from scratch.

You have a hidden partition that needs to be unhidden for Windows to acknowledge it. I think PM 8 can handle this--you should be able to tell it to ignore the geometry error and unhide the partition.

Through the MS-DOS fdisk, you should be able to unhide it by making it active, but you'll need to research that some.

Thanks for all your help, I have solved the problem. Turns out in Powerquest BootMagic there is a "visible partitions" option and for some reason this partition was automatically selected to be not visible. I just had to override the default settings and make the partition visible. Works fine now. And to think I was about to get mad at Linux for screwing me over