Re: Linux, FAT32 and a mighty odd MBR.

[Mike Orr <mso@jimpick.com>]

On Thu, Oct 30, 1997 at 01:15:06PM +1100, Dale Harrison wrote:
> Until it came to LILO. Installed LILO, booted Linux fine. Added the lines
> to boot Win95, it took 2 goes for it to install the new record [it never
> complained the first time about failing]. Problem is, it simply doesn't
> boot Win95. It says "booting Win95", then returns to the LILO prompt.
> 
> The problem remains, I can't seem to overwrite the MBR, not with LILO, not
> with fdisk. I found out that the Windows partition was FAT32, but surely

I bet FAT32 is the problem.  It is not DOS-compatible, so existing disk
utilities cannot operate on it.  We had that problem at work: a
department got a DTP computer with FAT32 and we can't work on it,
because our scandisk and f-prot won't work on it.  Under Linux there's a
kernel patch to recognize FAT32 partitions, but it's still experimental.
Since Lilo works differently than any other Linux utility (it writes the
physical address of the partition's bootstrapping code into its menu,
because when Linux is not booted yet and names such as "/dev/hda2" have
no meaning yet.  Perhaps FAT32 has a different disk header format or
something.

If not too inconvenient, you may want to reformat the Win95 partition to
FAT16.  That may be less of a headache in the long run until all the
utilities have had time to catch up.

This is all based on secondhand knowledge -- I've never used FAT32
myself.

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