File System
 

hey there me again,
the guy who has a problem with the File System

remember? well i used partition magic 8 and i remember that i put the linux partition AFTER the windows partition. The missing files are vmm32.vxd and another one, the classic windows boot files, i started my machine with a Windows emergency disk and started windows in DOS mode but it says that my HardDisk has 2mb of space, 0 mb used, but my Hard Disk has 40GB. i modified the boot disk and in all the BAT files i put format c: to format all my computer but it doesent work. I was thinking if i put my HD on another computer, it wont recognize the HD but if i run PartitionMagic, does it will recognized it? or what can i do?

ummm no, I have no idea what you've posted before, perhaps someone else does?

But from what I just read a few possiblities come to mind...

Are you running ME or XP? I don't believe either of those systems actually support fat16 and you may have created a fat16 partition... if so your in luck with your partition magic because you can use it to convert the fat16 partition to fat32.

Use dos fdisk and view the partition information for the drive, this should give you a little bit better picture of what is going on... depending on the version of fdisk you use, it may not list any linux partitions you have or it may say they are of type "unknown" this is normal and does not indicate a problem. If you use fdisk from your ME boot disk then it may list your fat16 partition as type "unknown" as well (not sure off the top of my head).

Another possiblity is that you didn't use partition magic properly to split up the partitions... you may need to restore your old configuration if possible and start over. What distro of linux are you installing?
Everything I've seen on the web indicates you should install linux first for a dual boot and this is ludicrous in my opinion... I find it much better to install windows first and leave space unparitioned for linux on a dual boot system. Windows will overwrite your MBR in many cases and wipe out lilo and possiblity your only way to boot linux for one... the installers for most distributions will detect your existing windows install and preserve it, usually automatically adding in a boot entry in lilo (or grub) for your windows installation. This makes things nice and easy.

I'll go with that view :}

Most likely converted stuff to extended
partition, and now the stub in the mbr
is identifying some unused space of
2 MB size as the primary partition... ;)

Cheers,
Tink