Things are going generally well on the software reinstall to my new 80 GB drive.
My faux pas this time seems to be with wanting a FAT32 partition on my extended partition.
Needing to fill 3 primary partitions and using the last as an extended, I wanted to have a FAT32 partiton available to use with Windows 98 as an extended partition. After the fact this does not seem possible. I have tried both 0B and 0C. I assume the Win95 FAT32 ext'd is ment for assigning the extended partition rather that a FAT32 partition on an extended partition.
Any suggestions, links, info, etc. ?
TIA

Just posted about this:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...458#post638458

FAT32 on hda10 on a new 80GB drive accessible in W2K and Slack. Very similar. Though I suppose Win98 could have some goofy limitation?

Using the "mkdosfs -F 32" on my type 0C does not make the partition available to Windows 98.
My extended partion is /dev/hda4 and my understanding (now) is that Windows would have been happy if the extended partition was /dev/hda2. But I am reluctent to put other "real" primary drives at the end of the drive.
Perhaps I will have to do without my spare FAT32 partition? The partitioning is already done and installs made.

Hm. I guess I got lucky then - mine is on hda4, too, and W2K doesn't have a problem with it. I couldn't find it specified anywhere but it does seem Windows98 makes the assumption it's going to be the only system (of course) and that the only possible extended partition you'd make is on hda2.

I trick W2K into booting from hdb. Maybe you can trick Win98 in a similar way. I'm not sure exactly what to do but the man pages for lilo.conf, under 'change-rules' and 'change' and various other options would seem to make it possible to hide your 2nd and 3rd primaries (from Windows?) so that it would read hda4 as the second partition. I don't know if that would work or not, but it's an idea.

The other thing's a pain but, if Win98 isn't recognizing the extended partition, I'd guess you haven't bothered to put anything on it. You could try reformatting it as a Linux partition, swapping stuff from the second primary to there, tweaking what files need to be tweaked, and then redo the 2nd partition. To be honest, I'd always avoided extended partitions if I could and put them on last if I couldn't, so don't know if you can put them anywhere or not. I don't see why 3&4 couldn't be primary with 2 extended, though. Then maybe Windows would be happy. I don't know to much about Windows 98 - I didn't use it too terribly long before a virus killed it. (Well, the virus and a pair of hardware failures killed it.) That same box (repaired and reformatted) became my first Linux install.

I bet there is some simple LILO trickery, though - I'm just not sure what it is. Or maybe grub trickery, if you use that.

As far as I can tell, the hidden tags are only used for FAT and DOS partitions. I am looking some more at this.
FYI
hda1=Windows
hda2=Solaris
hda3=FreeBSD
hda4=Extended (Linux, storage)
Since I did not realize I would have this problem, stuff is already installed. Although I would like to have it set up as I originally intended, at worse I will use the space for something else.

does dos fdisk see the extended partition? try creating your fat logical partition with that, and format it undera native environment.

if you want to change the order in which partitions are listed in mbr without actually moving them, you can use this dos tool.
http://geocities.yahoo.com.br/downlo.../info/part.htm
linux has no problems with this 'strange' partition table, don't know for bsd

DOS fdisk "sees" 1 Windows/FAT primary, 2 non-DOS/Windows primaries, and 1 (primary) extended partition.
When I poke around in adding or deleting logical partitions (Windows/DOS) fdisk thinks there is only 7 MB of space avaiable, even if I delete large spaces from cfdisk in Linux.
Windows/Dos fdisk does not list or show any of the partitions in the extended partition.

I am staying away from Ranish on this computer and drive. Although I see it get generally good reviews, some (seeming informed) opinions call it dangerous. Since it does things other fdisk programs do not, I assume that may be what is "dangerous".

Here it is months later.
All of a sudden I notice this weekend that the logical FAT32 partition is now visible in Windows.
It never was while I was working on it.
I have no idea why it is there now.