Hi,

I am running redhat 9 and WinXP on separate hard drives;
I had 4 partitions on my linux hdd:
root
part 1
part 2
and a swap partition

I ran out of space on my windows drive, and I knew I had nothing on "part 2" on my linux drive so I decided to format over part 2 as a fat32 partition and use it for windows

I did this by using the windows XP installation disk partition manager

When I tried to start linux up the next day, I got a file system error or something and was given the oppurtunity to fix the filesystem

I guess I need to edit the /etc/fstab file which I understand has all the start-up information...?

Does anyone know what I can do, or do I need to reinstall?

Also, I realize that editing a ext3 partition with windows was an incredibly stupid thing to do; What would be the correct way to have done it?

hmm, well, first, of course copy everything you want off the partition (if anything), then of course unmount it, run FDISK, delete the partition in question, then create a new DOS partition in the free space left, save, run mkfs -t msdos *the partition* (or mkfs -t vfat) then run your favorite text editor (emacs, vi, vim, pico, etc...) and change the line ext3 in /etc/fstab to msdos (or vfat) then remount the partition.