I left 10 gigs empty on my C drive when I put Windows 98
on it, so when I installed Mandrake 9.1 it was a snap.

BUT, now windows found that area and assigned a drive letter to it, but strangely picked drive letter E. I already had
another drive with 2 partitions of drive D and E. So now Partition E is F and the new E is always bothering Windows.

Scan Disk always wants to take a crack at it and when i empty my Recycle Bin it prompts windows to tell me that drive E is not formatted and would I like to do this.

Odd.. can i get Windows to turn the other cheek and ignore it? I am not too bothered about moving the old drive E to F (dreamweaver handled it elegantly with just two path changes and fixed everything)

thanks!!!!!

driven

What filesystem is installed on the drives containing Linux? If windows can see them I assume it is fat32. I suggest using ext2/3 for Linux, that way Windows wont squack about errors on a drive it cant read.

You're on the money, but what would be the most
sane way of converting it to ext2/3 since it is all installed
now???

And can I just convert the Linux portion?

Becuase right now when I plug in my USB smart card reader,
windows just bumped my old E partition ANOTHER letter down (the Linux partition took over E and moved the old E to F, now the card reader moved it down to G!!! arg!!!)
Seems like it gets the last letter before the optical drives... who would of thought a USB device would butt in line?

thanks if you can send me in the right direction for the fix to
this nagging problem... it is disrupting the system way too much!

driven

i'm guessing here that you don't realise that the linux drive can't be fat32, it's not possible... and presumably IS ext3 already.

what's hapenned, i'd also guess, is that the partition has been formatted without the actual partition table being updated, so even though you have an ext3 filesystem on the drive itself, the MBR partition table still thinks it is fat32. so, in linux, as root, run fdisk or cfdisk and change that partition type to ext2, or "linux native"... id number 83 whatever they call it. then windows will no longer be able to see the drive at all.

HI, i ran fdisk and cfdisk with fdisk more informative.. here is the screen

[root@my driven2sin]# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 * 1 3647 29294496 c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2 3648 4982 10723387+ 5 Extended
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part5 3648 4411 6136798+ 83 Linux
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6 4412 4474 506016 82 Linux swap
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7 4475 4982 4080478+ 83 Linux

Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/disc: 20.5 GB, 20525137920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2495 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part1 * 1 1246 10008463+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part2 1247 2495 10032592+ f Win95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target1/lun0/part5 1247 2495 10032561 b Win95 FAT32
[root@my driven2sin]#


so it seems that all is well, but windows notices
it during scan disk on boot and then gives it a drive letter
when looking at it via the My Computer icon, but when looking at it through system properties it only shows it with drive letter C and no mention of E there.

I looked at the drive in Windows with FreshDiagnose and it sees the Linux partition but only gives a handful of info about it (Accessible *Yes*, fixed drive, lots of zeros for values and then some Disk Cache info)


what gives???? thanks to all !!

driven