I've recently chopped up my /home so I have a seperate /fat32 partition formatted as vfat/fat32 for my mp3.

It's after my /home so actually it's at the opposite end of my hard drive from my windows partition, but how can I make windows (XP sp2) see the partition - I presume it can as it's in a windows format?

regards

John

Say what?

So you resized the partition containing the data that was mounted at /home

You then created the fat32 filesystem on the new partition, probably using mkfs.vfat or something similar.

And now you are wondering if windows will be able to see that "drive"?

Should be fine, as long as it's not your C: drive...

Cool

I'm not sure if Windows will recognize *any* FAT32 partition as a separate drive.

Windows is very picky about partitions. I think that only if you've partitioned a drive from Windows fdisk as a Windows "secondary" partition then Windows will pick it up.

windows recognized my fat32 partition, I use it for swap space between linux and windows. I used Boot It NG though for my partitioning

the only problem you may have is windows may not asign a drive letter automaticly. i have had this problem befor but its easy to mount it or give it a drive letter. just go into controle pannel and then administrative tools and then computer managment once that has loaded up go to disk managment and you should see the drive there then its just a case of a right click on that drive and click on change drive letter or something like that then simply click on add or change then you can either mount it on your C drive or give it a drive letter

hope this helps if you have the same problem as i did

I'll have to boot back into windows, but from what I could tell, yesterday the xp couldn't even see the drive - I believe it was allocated a drive letter - the partitioning was actually done with partition magic 8 under the windows install.

I actually accomplished the repartitioning, by making a copy of my /home data by tarring it and saving the tarred file in / I then booted into windows and deleted the whole /home partiton (in it's original form), split the space up, then formatted the newly resized /home as ext 2 and the new fat32 partition as fat 32. I then booted back into windows, did mkfs reiserfs etc etc for the /home (as it had previously formatted as reiserfs) and restored the data by just untarring. I then changed/modified the fstab so it had the various entries for my windows XP partition and the fat32 partiton (originally called fat32) and did the mount points etc etc.

Since then, I've copied all my mp3's to the fat32 partition.

The only reason I think it may struggle seeing the fat32 partition is that it's on the "wrong" side of the linux partitions - but even if it showed the linux partitions as "unallocated", surely it would still "see" the fat32 (well I'm presuming that's correct).

regards

John

Well having checked, it's not even seeing it as a seperate partition at the moment. I don't know why, the admin tools>computer management>disk management is just seeing it as a "healthy - Unknown partition".

So does anyone have any idea's what I'd need to do from here so the windows install can see the fat32 partition and play the mp3's that are there ?????

regards

John