I am running ZipSlack 9.1 on /dev/hda1 which is my C: drive which contains windows xp. I was working on connecting to the internet with linux and couldnt figure it out, so I decided to go into windows and download some packages for my distro and them boot into linux and install the packages. I downloaded many packages that I needed and upon booting into linux, I found all the files were renamed to something weird like BZIP2-#1.$00 and the original filename was bzip2-1.0.2-i386-4.tgz with some of the files, I could rename them in windows and they would stay as long as they were short filenames. This is really bothering me, is there any way I could fix this? I heard something about putting ZipSlack to it's own partition because of something with the other files from windows. Could someone please help me out?

As I recall, DOS/windows has an odd way of allowing files to have long filenames.

All files are allowed to be eight characters followed by a period and three more letters. No longer. If you open a DOS prompt and look at your long-named files with the dir command, you'll see the same shortened names.

The long names are kind of 'virtual names' that windows shows you when you use the appropriate software to view the file names.

So the problem is, Windows is renaming your files to fit it's own way of doing things. Try just saving the downloads with names of no more than eight characters

The strange file names that you're seeing aren't due to the NTFS (windows) filesystem, but rather to the UMSDOS filesystem on which Zipslack resides. So you don't want to copy files into your C:\linux directory while in windows, because the UMSDOS filsystem has to 'synchronize' on boot up, which leads to odd names.

I haven't worked with Zipslack for a few years, but there used to be a /DOS directory that was configured to give access to your host filesystem. Check to see if there is such an animal, then navigate through the directory structure to find your packages with the right names.

As I say, it's been a while, and this may no longer exist with NTFS formatted disks because there's no safe way for Linux to write to NTFS (yet). However, if the kernel is properly compiled, Linux has no problem reading from NTFS.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere