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Seems like this question pertains more to Windows than it does Linux, but I'd appreciate any help on the matter...
I have 2 seperate drives attatched to my PC, an 80GB with a Debian 3.0 Woody install on it and a 9GB with XP installed on it. I have three partitions on my 80GB - a large root partition, a 1GB swap partition and a 20GB FAT32 partition that I was going to use as a shared partition between the two operating systems. However I have the following problems:
1) When mounting the FAT32 drive during bootup, Debian displays a warning saying "FAT32 SUPPORT IS STILL ALPHA!", and then hangs for a while before continuing. I can still use the partition but this is strange because on a previous install of Woody 3.0 I was able to mount and use FAT32 partitions without a hitch. What gives?
2) When I boot from my second drive (the XP drive), the FAT32 partition is not accessible. If I go into the system administrators menu and look at the attatched drives, my Linux drive comes up fine with all the partitions correctly listed, but I can't manipulate them and I can't seem to mount them. I installed XP on NTFS, could this be a problem?
I can't. See here's the problem. I go into the volume manager, XP knows there's a second drive there, it knows there's 3 partitions, it knows the sizes, it knows one is FAT32 and it even knows the volume name I gave it ("SHARED"[sic]). However when I write click on the partition, all the options are shaded out except for "Delete Partition" and "Properties". I've tried using command line tools, 'mountvol' won't even detect it, and 'diskpart' detects it but won't let me mount it. It's really frustrating. Yay for Windows.
That's a really strange problem. All Windows partitions on internal hard disks should 'mount' upon boot in Windows. Perhaps Debian has messed up the file allocation table.
Okay I fixed it. In case anyone else comes across the same problem, here's how.
I used Partition Magic in Windows to delete the FAT32 partition I had created in Linux, and recreated the partition again using Partition Magic. I don't know much about extended/primary partitions at all, but when I recreated it, PM seemed to encapsulate my original partition in an extended partition. This meant I couldn't mount the drive in Linux as hda2 as I originally had done because hda2 now refers to the extended encapsulation (pardon the loose terminology here). Using fdisk I discovered I now have a new partition called hda5, so I mounted that succesfully and now have a drive I can share between operating systems.
It seems that Windows is quite particular about what drives it chooses to mount. Either way, Partition Magic is definately a great piece of software.
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