The partition that I've been using for my c drive for wine is always being corrupt. The c drive is its own 10 gig HDD, which i formatted with mke2fs and installed HL etc on there, but after a while itll be corrupt and ill have to fix it with fsck but then that just gives HL heaps of errors because of loss of files, etc.

I've been thinking maybe this is caused because HL doesn't like the ext2 filesystem? So I've been trying to remove this entire partition then re-creating it with a Fat32 FS, or even just formatting it. I can't seem to do it under linux for some reason (I'll delete the partition with fdisk, then recreate it and everything is still on the drive!! WTF?!) and i still can't seem to get the mkdosfs command to work. So I've booted into XP and when i try to format the partition it fails right at the end....and when i try with Partition Magic 7 i get the error number of 4 and description: Bad argument/parameter...

ARGH! no matter what i do i can't seem to format this drive!!! any idea's....and maybe idea's as to what is really causing this?

And no, the corruption isn't due to a possibly screwed hdd as this is the second one ive tried...same thing has happened to both (apart from this formatting problem..)

Bump...

anybody? moses, you were good at partitioning...where are ya??

Well I don't know about partition magic. But after recreating the partition with fdisk all you have done is modified the partition table. You haven't modified the partition itself yet. So if you would try to mount it then the mount command will try to detect the filesystem by reading some of it. It then will probably detect all the old filesystem and still show all the same files present.

What exactly is going wrong when you run the mkdosfs command. Which error messages do you get? Have you tried running it with -v for additional information?

Reading through the fdisk man pages it mentions something about having to clear the first 512 bytes for the dos6.x format command to work. I don't know if partition magic also needs something similar done. But I'd definetly try to format it with mkdosfs first.

is there some way to erase the MBR and the first 512bytes of the HDD?

also:
root@gardiner_desk:/# mkdosfs /dev/hdc -v
mkdosfs 2.8 (28 Feb 2001)
mkdosfs: Will not try to make filesystem on '/dev/hdc'

thats all it gives me...

Well the man page of fdisk explains pretty well how to blank the first 512 bytes. Something like:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc1 bs=512 count=1

/dev/hdc references the complete physical disk. From your story I understand you've created a partition on that drive. So you would have to tell it to create a filesystem on /dev/hdc1.
You mentioned it's a 10 gig disk so I assume you'd want to format it as fat32 or you won't really get past 2 gigs. According to the man page of mkdosfs it defaults to either 12 or 16 bit, which ever one fits better. So you should force it to 32.

mkdosfs -vF 32 /dev/hdc1

Since you where having problems with corrupt blocks it might be wise to add the -c option to the mkdosfs command so it check for bad blocks.

thats heaps, worked like a dream

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=38481

any idea's for that one Mik? heh