format partition again in fedora 3???
 

hi all im a newbie,
i have installed fedora core 3 an i have already has it working together with another os (win xp ) on 2 different HD,
one is xp and the 2nd is fedor
when i installed fedora i created the partition as follows.
/ with 15 gb
/boot 100 mb
/swap with 2 Gb
/home with 100 gb for all the files, data etc... is been formated As EXT3

now after play for a while i realise i need the extra space of the "/home" with its 100 GB to be shared in the XP too in order ot have files shared between the to Os.
i know i need to format it again as VFAt but i dont know how.
do i need to do it from the install rescue and before bacup the data to fdifferent partition or is ther a way to do it directly from fedora.
what exactly do i need to do after having the linux working???
thank you very much for any help how to do that because i couldnt find info regarding theat. all i found was doing it during instalaltion but not after have the linux wroking !
as mentioned before i wat to be able to make this partition readable in xp too.
thanks

You can format your partition logging as root then

Warning: all your data from /home partition will be lost.

Umount your home partition:

# umount /home

then format it again

# mkdosfs /dev/hdXX

change hdxx to the /home partition device

edit your /etc/fstab and change the device and fs type.

thanks msmarcal,
ill try it.
my /home partition which i want to format is called "hde5"

btw is it better maybee just to leave it as it is and create from that partition
a partition that will than format to vfat? is it possible?

what do i need to change in fstab ? how do i know what to change there?
thank you for your help
:D

hi ppl,
what do i need to change in the fstab after doing as msmarcal suggested?
thankis, or is there another way?

IMHO it would better to resize your /home partition and create a seperate FAT32 for sharing files. Assuming the new partition is going to be /dev/hde6, your fstab entry would be something like:

/dev/hde6 /media/shared vfat umask=000,users,exec 0 0

You need to create a directory to use as a mount point. See man pages for mount and fstab for what all the options mean.

hey michel or anyone,
im following your suggestion to resize my /home partition and create a seperate FAT32 for sharing files.
how do i Do that? thanks (how can i create new partition from by resizing the hde5 inside fedora 3? , what are the commands or the instruction to do it? )
thanks,

ah,another Q:
is it ok to use the NTFS RPm for my kernel in order to see the xp drives from linux?
thaank you

Hi,

I think you can use "parted" to resize your ext3 partition without loosing any data. Are you sure your home partition is /dev/hde5 and not /dev/hda5? Because depending on that you must run "parted /dev/hde" or "parted /dev/hda". After that, if you write "help" the program will display all the choices you have. The ones you are interested on are: print, resize and quit (but I can be wrong, so use help!)

There is also "qtpart", which does the same but has a GUI, so could be easier to use.

I'm not a Fedora user, so I don't know if these programs come in the default installation, but surely you can find the RPMs to install them...

About your question of NTFS. It is OK as long as you only read the partition. Write is not fully supported!!

Good luck!

EDIT: Two things to mention:

1) Try to backup. It is always possible that something goes wrong...
2) If something goes wrong or you decice to format anyway, do not create only one FAT32 partition. Use parted (or fdisk) to create a Linux partition for /home and other for the FAT32.