[wplug] need help with partitions

[Coutch, Robert]

Is LBA turned on in BIOS and was this setting changed since the time the
disk was originally partitioned?

-Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: R.E.Coutch [mailto:coutchre at usaor.net]
Sent: Monday, March 03, 2003 12:41 AM
To: coutchre at tvratings.com
Subject: [wplug] need help with partitions


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Dear all.

Today I helped a friend install Red Hat 8.0 on his machine. Originally 
the machine had two partitions, with Windows XP's NTFS. We deleted the 
second partition, recognized as /dev/hda5 by the installer. In its 
place, we created /dev/hda5 (ext3fs-linux root), /dev/hda6 
(FAT-/mnt/windows), /dev/hda7 (ext3fs-/mnt/windows2), /dev/hda8 (swap).

After installing and rebooting in Linux wed notice that by mistake we 
formatted /dev/hda7 as ext3fs. No problems, I thought, so I just 
unmounted the partition and then ran mkfs.vfat /dev/hda7. It didn't 
complain, and then I updated /etc/fstab and mounted the partition, 
read/wrote to it fine, unmounted it, all was merry.

The we booted windows XP. The second FAT partition was not visible. We 
opened the disk manager and saw that it is visible but has not been 
assigned a drive letter. Only command available was to delete logical 
partition. So we delete it, and then try to re-create it. No go, the 
only options given to us was to create an NTFS partition! So we exit, 
and reboot.

We boot Windows XP again, this time both FAT partitions are gone and 
shown as free space! We recreate the first one as FAT, and then the 2nd 
one could only be recreated as NTFS, as before. We quit and boot Linux, 
only to find both windows partitions inaccessible, the swap partition 
destroyed, and only the original Windows XP partition /dev/hda1 and the 
linux root partition /dev/hda5 intact.

The output of fdisk -l /dev/hd* is attached.

How on Earth does one recover from a mess like that, and does anyone 
have any idea WHY did it break so badly?

Thanks for any suggestions

- -A
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