help emergency please
 

linux is cool and all but now i cant boot windows
i was doing all this formatting crap: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=309147
but never touched sda, where windows is
i have verified it is all still there as i can see it in /drives/windows/, but when i push any key to interrupt fedora booting, and then pick 'Other' (why cant it just say windows), i get some error that included noverify or something, then the last line was all this garbage kind of crazy characters. what did i do
i mean linux is fun and stuff but i have to get work done really really fast as in tomorrow afternoon so please if you have any idea as to anything please post

ok the error message says:

Booting 'Other'
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
[a bunch of garbage characters]

again i really need a solution to this soon

did your windows ever work right after installing linux?

yeah up until i decided to format the EXTRA drive in linux
and again i never touched sda just hdd
i think its like the boot loader or something because i saw very similar message in text file examples on teh internet GRUB or something

FINALLY BACK IN WINDOWS!!!
But the 250gig drive I formatted to FAT32 does not appear in the drive list. What do I do? I really need to get my stuff off someone else's computer.

Note: no longer in emergency status.

You have mentioned formatting this 250gig drive in several threads now. I have to ask: why did you format such a large drive in FAT32, of all things? Talk about a space waster.

I suspect your problem with windows is that Win2K and WinXP both limit FAT32 partitions to 32 gigs even though the filesystem itself has a 2TB limit.

so that both Fedora and Windows could read it
i hear fedora can read it but its really crappy and hard to get to work

They won't let your format the drive to bigger than 32GB but they do read larger partitions - I've used Partition Magic before to create a large FAT32 partition (for the same reason as the OP, but not as big as 250GB though!) which Windows was happy with.

I wondered about that possibility but wasn't sure.

In that case the thing to do is fire up the windows disk manager and let it "sign" the partition. If the partition is properly configured, Windows should be happy with it after it gets to do this. It won't prevent the partition from being loaded by any other OS; it is just something Windows has to do. After that, I think, the partition will be detected.

A 250 Gig FAT32 partition is still hugely wasteful of space.

jiml8 - Do you have any other recommendations on partition types for a partition that's shared between Linux and Windows? At the moment I'm running a couple of FAT32 partitions (120GB and 40GB) because they need to be shared with reliable write access. If there's a better option that FAT32 I'd be glad to know.

Cheers!

Yeah really if its a waste of space its still my only option. I need to read and write to the 250gig hard drive from both Windows and Linux. Then again, FAT32 doesn't even work correctly because of the size thing. Recommendations?

I run VMWare so I don't dual boot. I always boot Linux then run Windows in VMWare. This lets me configure my box as a LAN. I transfer files back and forth using Samba and I can mount/dismount any partition of any file type in either environment, just as you ordinarily do on a LAN. Actually, with VMWare, I can cut and paste from an application on one side of the system to an application on the other side of the system. It is very cool.

That said, it doesn't solve the problem of dual booting and accessing data from both sides. Before I ran VMWare, here is how I did it.

I kept a small FAT32 partition to use as scratchpad in order to move files I was working on back and forth. It turns out that there were very few things that I actually needed to work on on both sides, so I went another way most of the time and only used the FAT32 partition for things that I needed to write from both sides.

Generally, I would be writing the file on one side or the other and would only need to read it from the other side. Linux has long had read support for NTFS so I could easily mount an NTFS partition read-only and access the file I wanted to look at. If I actually had to change it then write it, then I would usually write it to the FAT32 partition.

From the windows side, I would run explore2fs to access the ext2/ext3 partitions. You can get that utility here:

http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm

I would do it the same way; read only.

It worked pretty well, wasn't particularly inconvenient, and it kept me from tying up a huge partition with that truly miserable FAT file system.