I seem to have the most bizarre problems - oh well, give you Gurus a challenge eh?

For some reason my Docs partition has become Hidden Win95 FAT32 (LBA) - I would post fdisk -l output but but I'm in Winblows atm.

I tried unhiding with QTParted, Ranish PM, Paragon PM and cfdisk, and I ran fdisk /MBR for the hell of it, but I cannot get Win98 to detect the partition. I don't believe there are any tools with Windows to add undetected partitions - fdisk requires a reboot, after which Win98 still fails to find it, and Drive Converter etc. are completely useless.

If anyone can tell me why, that would be very nice indeed.

P.S. Why would fdisk be able to say disk usage of NON-DOS partitions but not be able to say what they were?

Just use Linux fdisk, and change the partition type to "c"(W95 FAT32 (LBA))

I'll keep on trying, but I used cfdisk for exactly that, and on reboot, Win98 can't spot the stupid thing.

Should I wipe the vile OS?
The family would complain but...I think it's worth it.

And I could always reinstall - again...

I thought that would getcha!

Tried what you said - and no, it doesn't work. It is the strangest problem I have come accross with my history of strange problems:

Duplicated entries in debian menu.
Can't get ACPI/APM power off to work.
Custom kernel caused all terminal emulators to be unable to open a shell (blank win).
LILO complains device_mapper or similar not found after kernel compilation.
LILO complains "Cannot detect sound device in use in present system." or similar.
Numerous problems installing debian unstable packages ( by definition unstable).
... and many more.

donni,
did you ever find a solution to this problem? i have the same problem, and haven't really tried to fix it, as i had no idea where to even start. though i don't have a custom kernel. at work now, but will post the kernel version when i get home.

No, no idea what is wrong.

Google returned nothing, but I've always been hopeless at using it effectively.

It could be software or something to do with the workings of a terminal emulator that requires kernel support for something, but I have no clue. It wouldn't be something like "Virtual Terminal support", I don't think.

It's a tricky one.

Oh, BTW, I'm using 2.6.6-k7

Make sure you have pty support compiled into the kernel, in the .config file its "CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS"

As for the partition problem, are you able to mount it in Linux? Or if you want to try reconstructing the partition table, you can use these 2 tools

Parted
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted

Testdisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.html?testdisk.html

Also IIRC Win98 doesn't like having more than one primary partitions in a single disk, maybe that's something you can look into? I could be wrong though.


Because that info is read off the partition table which resides in the MBR, not the partition themselves. In each partition table entry there's an one byte field which specifies the partition type(remember the hex codes for partition types you see in Linux fdisk), and dos fdisk can only identify a limited number of them.

Sorry, yeah, I realised this quite recently - don't worry, just me thinking "legacy? why do I want that?!" and removing the necessary module with it!

I gave up with the hidden partition - I just transferred the stuff onto the C: drive. The only real reason it was there was because it would be a bad idea to put shared documents which I would need to recover on WinXP's NTFS. Now since we use 98 instead, it doesn't really matter much.

Does anyone know how to enable the computer to power off automatically? I installed acpid, apmd and compiled stuff in to the kernel, added apm=power-off to the boot options etc. - nothing.
I can't find anything on the web to help me.

I am also trying to get a 2.6.5 kernel to work, and I ran into exactly the same
problem with getting a shell. Everything else seems to work. I do have the
UNIX98_PTYS option set, but not "LEGACY_PTYS" - I'll have to try that. Did anybody
else manage to solve this problem?

I also had problems with getting Windows XP to recognize a vfat partition. It was
working fine then it stopped after one of the ubiquitous Windows upgrades were
installed. I solved the problem using PartitionMagic from Windows - turned out that
XP couldn't cope with having two primary partitions on the drive, so I changed it to a
logical partition then was able to un-hide it (took two separate reboots).
Unfortunately this resulted in renumbering the partitions so that Linux was no longer
able to boot. This required booting with a rescue CD (Knoppix), fixing /etc/fstab and
/etc/lilo.conf to reflect the new partition numbers, and rerunning lilo. I ran into a
sticky problem there as well ("/dev/hda permission denied") and solved it as
follows:

su
mount /dev/hda7 /mnt/hda7 /* my root partition is on hda7
chroot /mnt/hda7
lilo

You have to do the mounting from an su shell to make this work.

Good luck!