[techtalk] Partitioning with fdisk

[Darren Osadchuk]

I recently purchased a new HD with the express intent of
(re)installing Linux. It's a 13 GB drive, and since linux is, for the
time being, going to be my secondary OS, I don't need all
that space devoted to it. So I decided to use about 5GB
for Linux, and create a single Win95 partition out of the rest.

Setting up the partitions using fdisk went well enough, and the
linux install went more-or-less smoothly. The problem is that
Windows has issues with the partition on the drive that it's
supposed to be reading. It sees the D: drive, but says that
"the device is inaccessible" (or something like that). I can
re-format the drive in Windows, and the dialogue box says
that the size of the drive matches the partition size. However,
re-formatting in Windows makes the Linux boot process freeze
when it tries to read hdb3 (the Win95 partition). I can't remember
the exact message, because it's rather long.

I was told by a friend who had the same problem that Windows
partitions created in Linux are unreadable by Windows. Is this
the case? Is there another way of setting this up? The Win95
partition doesn't need to be bootable, since the OS is on the
primary drive. Ideally, I'd like to be able to fix this without
having to re-partition and re-install Linux, but since I haven't yet
done much in the way of configuring, etc., that's not a huge
issue for me. It would also be a plus if I didn't have to purchase
Partition Magic or some other similar software.

Thanks!
Darren


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