Hi everyone!

Here goes... When I have linux installed, I can't seem to boot from any kind of floppy disk with the exception of a windows 98se startup disk. The reason I want to do this is because I need to use ghost and partition magic from dos. I've tried 2 different versions of ghost, both gave me general protection faults. And partition magic 8 and 7 both gave me some crazy causeway errors in the midst of loading up.

Both programs seem to go through the boot process ok, but fail when they try to launch the applications themselves (ie. ghost.exe). I've tried different disks, booting from both lilo and straight out of the bios, neither of these work.

The only quirky part is that these diskettes were made using a windows 2000 vmware machine. But why would I be able to boot up fine and run stuff off of the win98se disk, and not be able to run ghost2003 or pm8?

Is there anything I can do??

...A utility to convert ntfs to fat or fat32 from inside linux without data loss, will pretty much solve this problem. I don't need to ghost my partition...

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: All my linux partitions are ext3 (in case it might matter).

well according to windows (if i recall correctly) you cant convert from ntfs to fat32, it's like a 1-way contract (i think it says this during an install). Also, i know Linux doesnt have stable support for even writing to NTFS let alone converting it to FAT32 without data loss.

If you have to partition some stuff, why not use fdisk or some ext3 tools?

What exactly are you trying to do?

I think windows can convert FAT32 to NTFS but not the other way around... I'm not 100% on this though.

What I'm trying to do is convert a huge HD (160GB) used for backups, from NTFS to FAT32 so that I can write to it in linux until I get a suitable drive to move stuff to and actually format the darn thing to ext3 or reiserfs.

For the moment I solved my ghosting problem by installing partimage. That worked just as good as ghost. Also, I was looking at a clone of partition magic called qtparted for my ntfs to fat conversion. But from what I read I think it only supports resizing of ntfs partitions. And like you said linux does'nt exactly have stable support for ntfs, so even if I could convert, I might lose over 100GB of files.

For now I'll just have to keep my eyes peeled for a solution and hope for more replies.

Thanks.

well that's a lot of files, what if the drive goes bad?

Hehe Now that K3b supports writing DVD's, I've started backing up the critical stuff for just such an occasion. But there's no way I'm going to break out 28 DVD-R's to back up the whole thing. Those things are expensive!

Anyhow, I trust a journalized FS over NTFS or FAT. Which is why I'm making this trek from NTFS to FAT to journalized in the first place. Hopefully I'll get a little more life out of my files this way.

*bump*

Anyone?

The only thing I can see that would help would involve having another drive to put the files on.


If your willing to risk the files then you might try ntrfresize. Maybe you can resize it several times moving a few files at a time.


It is supposed to allow you to shrink the ntfs filesystem, then you can resize the partition with fdisk to the size of the filesystem without loss of data.

This ntfsresize you mentionned sounds like a great but risky idea.

Resize -> copy over -> resize -> copy over... until it's all FAT32. At least that's what I'm getting from what you said.

I'll try it on an old 8GB drive I have. If the verdict is good then it solves my headache.

Thanks for the suggestion.

You can remove the stuff that's backed up on dvd, resize the filesystem, and then the unused space can be converted to a fat32 partition. At that point hopefully you can move the remaining files to the new partition, delete the first partition and create a fat32 partition in it's place, move the files back to that partition so they are at the first part of the drive.

If it won't fit try bzip2 maximum compression see if you can save some space.

Then delete the last partition and grow the fat32 partition with the files on it to use the whole drive.

I'm not sure but I think it will work without moving it back to the beginning of the drive.

Also you may move some of it, shrink the ntfs partition, grow the fat32, move some more.

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/m...d_2.html#SEC30




NOTE:


If these files are important I would go get some sort of backup media first. Of course if you do that then you can simply use fdisk and restore the files. It would be good to see if it works though.

I convinced one of my friends to lend me his 40GB usb drive. In addition I have 5 DVD's with the crucial files burnt (another 20GB gone). This means theres about 60GB of stuff to play with and 100GB of free space.

Since most of the truly important files will be on the DVD or 40GB drive, I'll definitely try what you suggested. I just hope linux will hold up through all the NTFS transfers. I know they say NTFS writing in linux is a little iffy, but I haven't had any problems so far... wish me luck!

I'll post back with the results soon enough!