Does XP Choke on ext3 Partitions?

philipogletree · 08-12-2005, 09:08 AM

Hello,

I have a brand new computer, it came with XP.

I have a 60 Gig Hard Drive that has never been used (although its about 6 months old) that I installed as a slave drive.

Everything seemed to be OK, the BIOS autodetected the HD and set it up correctly.

So I put a couple of VFAT partitions on it to transfer data to and from XP/Debian. No problems so far.

So then I tried to make a couple of Linux ext3 partitions with Partition Magic to get ready to install Debian. Now all of a sudden XP is taking 30 minutes to load and continually hitting the second HD. If I completely unplug the second HD, it boots up right away. XP seems to have marked the drives as NTFS even though they are ext3.

Does XP check all the drives at boot up and if so is there a way to tell it not to check certain drives?

Thank you in advance
Philip

Crito · 08-12-2005, 01:13 PM

XP chokes on large drives initialized with Linux. I think it's an LBA/geometry issue. Linux, on the other hand, will complain about the geometry (if initialized with XP) but still recognizes the partitions. So, my solution was to initialize and partition under XP but format as ext3 with Linux.

mherring02 · 08-12-2005, 11:54 PM

Personal preference with no technical credentials to back it up:

For dual-boot, I like 3 drives: 1 for Linux, 1 for Windows, 1 for data. generally, no amount of screwing around with one will hurt the other two. Data disk is formatted FAT32 which all Linux distros seem to read with no hassle.

Electro · 08-13-2005, 12:56 AM

I recommend that you do not use Partition Magic to format partitions. Let the OS utilities do that. Only use Partition Magic to help you create, merge, and split partitions. There is QTpartd that will do the same for free. Yes, it does NTFS partitions, but I have not tried it. As with all disk utilities, always backup.

Quote:

I think it's an LBA/geometry issue. Linux, on the other hand, will complain about the geometry (if initialized with XP) but still recognizes the partitions.

Incorrect, Windows will complain about the geometry because it is dependent on the BIOS, but not Linux. It must be a SUSE thing. For Linux partitions make sure the partitions are id as 83 then Windows will not get confused. Windows should be stating the Linux partition as unformatted but not NTFS.

bigrigdriver · 08-13-2005, 01:04 AM

My experience with windoze is, if it finds a partition not formatted for windoze, it will offer you to oportunity to fsck-up and reformat to windoze. Be careful; be very careful, when you see one of those dialogues pop up.