Hello again, I working on paritioning my HD for a dual-boot. The goal is to make files shareable from one parition to the other (for web server files and mp3s).

The way I am trying to do this is make my /home partition a FAT32 file system so that windows can read and write to it. I came to a problem though. In Disk Druid I can't make a vfat filesystem in the extended parition (can't make a non-linux partition in linux file-system). So I decided to try partitioning with Slackware's fdisk (because I had the disk at hand and there is a tutorial on this web site using Slackware for partitioning). Well whem I'm all set and done with partitioning, I boot back into FC to install. When I get to disk druid, all of the linux partitions I made with Slackware said "Linux Native" rather than the ext3 I was expecting. Also, the one FAT32 partition said "Windows 95 FAT" or something to that nature instead of the vfat I was expecting.

What's worse, I can't set mount points with any of these partitions without formatting them. If not for this, I could have been daring and just have prayed that the partitioning would work and I'd accomplish my goal. However, I need to be able to set mounting points for these partitions.

How do I fix this problem? One obvious thing that came to mind was to use FC's fdisk (if there is one) to do the job, which I tried and failed at (just typed fdisk at boot: but no go). So I looked up fdisk on Google and found nothing. So next is to ask here. Is there an fdisk for Fedora that I can use to get this partitioning done, and if so how do I get to it?

Another thought was to find a way to set the mount points for the partitions using Slackware. However, I'm not familiar enough with the CLI to find out. Is it possible to do this? How?

ext3 uses the Linux Native partition type. (Honestly, ext* uses whatever partition type you point it at. I think it will warn you if you're using the "wrong" type but will ffoirmat anyway.) Last time I used disk druid, I think the actual filesystem was chosen after choosing to format the mount point.

In the event that you do end up with ext2 filesystems, just run "tune2fs -j /dev/xxx#" to convert that partition to ext3 (be sure the partition is mounted rw) (also be sure to update /etc/fstab with the new partition type!)

vfat is the same thing as FAT32. vfat is the filesystem type that the linux mount command uses. FAT32 is what windows calls it and it associates with the partition ID type of hex value 0B.

The same goes for linux native. It is a generic description for the partition ID type of 83. The partition ID type is independent of what linux filesystem (ext2, ext3, reiserfs etc) it is actually formatted.

Partition ID types:
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partition...n_types-1.html

So you do not have a problem. With the partitions already created you assign a mount point and the filesystem you want it formatted as. FC installer should take care of the rest.

However if you format your /home partition as FAT32 you might have permission problems with some linux apps. I would create a seperate FAT32 partition to share data between linux and windows.

I was just thinking of suggesting that as a possibility. I was pretty sure I wouldn't have a problem with the ext3/Linux Native file system stuff, so now I know what to do.

Thanks for the help!