Hey, i just finished installing gentoo 2004.3 on my laptop, and now I want to get the windows XP part of the deal working, but I'm nervous about letting windows format. I want windows XP installed on the FAT32 filesystem so that I can write to it when I'm in gentoo, but when I boot to the windows XP cd the only two options that it gives for formatting the drive are NTFS quick, and NTFS.

To get around this I'm trying to use a windows 98 disc and format the hd into fat32. Running fdisk from gentoo i was able to format the soon to be windows partition into fat32, supposedly, but neither windows CD will recognize the partition as being usable for installation, they both want to "format the drive", and by this I'm not sure whether it wants to format the entirety of the 60gig hd, or format only the 40 gig partition that I've set aside for windows. Please advise.

When you boot off XP CD, you can format, or install on an existing partition. If there are existing partitions, you can choose them, and there is an information on how big the partition is and what type. If you don't have partitions made, then you have unpartitioned space. Just partition it, and format the newly created partitions. Remember, XP doesn't recognize ext2 or ext3 partitions, so it will label them as unknown partitions, so you can identify them by that. Hope this helps, but if you have any other questions, please post them here.

P.S.: Once you install windows, you will loose the GRUB boot loader, and will have to reinstall it. When you get to that part, come back here

Well, I already have grub up and running, and I've got gnome working now, so I'm posting to you from linux (yipee!!). But, What I was trying to say is that my first partition, "hdc1" is formatted as W95 FAT32, however, when I insert the windows CD it says that it all of the partitions are unrecognized filesystems... WHY WHY WHY, its friggen fat32 windows... gimme a break.

Anyone know why windows isn't recognizing the w95 fat32 partition???

I am only going to say this from personal experience.
Windows probably wont cooperate because you have a partition at hda1, more than likely an unknown partition.
I also have to ask is there a reason for you wanting windows on the 3rd harddrive? If there is then take the hd and make it master and put it on the ide0 slot to make it hda1. then install windows.
then install gentoo again fixing the errors from the hd swap. remember thst the first hda1 is now hdc1. Windows has to be in hda1 other wise it complains to no end. And you get the least problems in my experience.
That is what I would do. Otherwise try the 98 boot floppy and fdisk, good luck!

Honestly the best way around this is to get a copy of Hirem's Boot CS and use partition magic to play around with your hard drives exactly how you want to.

why when he has all he needs? And when you change the size of an xp partition with partition magic xp wont boot. Many many sleep less nights trying to figure what was wrong. After I threw out partition magic no problems at all. I just dont see downloading another cd and partition magic and burning the cd and then using partition magic. When all he has to do it use cfdisk or fdisk or sfdisk. I suggest starting fresh with installing windows first then linux and all should be good.

Actually, PartitionMagic isn't all that bad - but it doesn't like partitions that it hasn't created itself (read: later partitions created with Linux).

I know that this may be too late since the Gentoo installation is already up and running, but when I got my lappie, XP was preinstalled on NTFS and I wanted it on FAT32 and some Linux partition. What I did was:

1) Use PM to resize the WinXP partition to the size I wanted.
2) Use PM to convert NTFS to FAT32.
3) Forgot about PM and never used it again...
4) Installed Linux on the space left over after step 1 and let Linux create the partitions I needed.
5) Lived happily ever after (so far at least...)

/TLV

PM9 !

Hi. Over the Christmas holiday I installed SUSE 9.1 Professional on a Compaq laptop. After some mucking around my approach to creating a dual-boot Win XP/Linux setup was to setup partitions 1. NTFS, 2. FAT32 and 3. Linux as follows:

1. wipe the harddrive!
2. re-install Win XP HE on the first partition in NTFS. During the Win XP install process I also created a second partition in FAT32 (to use as shared data drive)
3. install SUSE, which looked after the Linux side of things and installed GRUB as the boot manager

Initially I tried using a partitioning tool, but to be honest I found it just complicated things for me (having never installed Linux before). However, I'm not sure why gauntalus only gets NTFS options - perhaps you need a clean harddrive to start with to get the FAT32 option? Or are you using Win XP Pro - it might want NTFS for security???

James

I bought a laptop pre-installed with Windows XP, I then resized the NTFS partition w/ Boot IT NG www.terabytunlimited.com then installed Debian in the free space, I then later resized windows again making it smaller as a swap space using FAT325

I have a thinkpad and whenever I re-install (from a hidden partition) it puts xp on a fat32 partition but as soon as you reboot, xp will convert it to ntfs straight away, and it seems as though there is nothing that you can do about it. I think that when thinkpads come out its a formatted in fat but on that first boot up, it will convert it. (dunno if its the same with an ordinary install cd though) Thats ok, just do as TLV says, which is what I did. Put XP on, resize with partition magic, make a fat 32 partition, and then leave 10g or so free space for linux. Install linux and youll be good to go. Personally, I moved "my documents" (which is where all the stuff that you want to look at is) to the fat partition so I can get at it with both os's. All of the other crap in xp such as program files etc, you dont wont to look at in linux, so they can live happliy on the ntfs partition..Or you can just move the files that you need to look at with linux to the fat partition.