Re: Increasing DOS partition

[Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>]

Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
> On Sat, 6 Sep 1997, Bill Wohler wrote:
> >   Any tips as to how I can format (or whatever) the DOS partition so
> >   that the OSs recognize the entire partition?  And hopefully do this
>
> is it a 12-bit FAT partition or 16-bit FAT partition?

  16 bit.  (ooo, ahh!)

>   otherwise,
> delete the partition with DOS FDISK and recreate it before formatting.

  I was afraid you were going to say that.  Well, here goes...

  Thanks for the help.

p.s. My DOS partition has since been successfully created and I'm
  restoring the (DOS) contents from backup--the Linux partitions
  escaped unscathed.  What turned out to be a great timesaver was that
  my Linux root was on a separate disk from the DOS partition.  The
  other lesson learned was that this should have been dealt with
  before taking a couple of days to customize my system to lower the
  anxiety factor.

  For those of you who are interested, here are my notes:

  - Write down partition sizes in MB
  
  - Back up stuff.  In this case, I copied the essentials to the
  second disk.

  - The cfdisk man page (which I saw after posting, unfortunately)
  said that you "need to zero first 512 bytes of partition for DOS
  format to work."  The command to do this is "dd if=/dev/zero
  of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1".  It went on to say that "for best
  results, use OS-specific partition table program," which is what I
  opted for.

  - Removed all partitions with cfdisk since DOS fdisk could not.

  - Created DOS partition with DOS fdisk.

  - Formatted partition with "format /u /s c:".  It saw all 650MB!

  - Reboot, LILO still happy--boots both DOS and Linux.

  - Linux on second disk booted to single user since it could no
  longer fsck the non-existent partitions.  I had /tmp, /var,
  /usr/local and the secondary swap on the first disk in addition to
  the DOS partition.

  - Recreated the Linux partitions on the first disk with cfdisk.

  - Ran fsck on these partitions just to be on the safe side.

  - Mounted the partitions.

  - Diffed the contents of /var and /usr/local with the saved copies.
  Everything on the partitions was fine and there was no need to
  restore them.

  - Reboot.  Get lunch.

Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>
Say it with MIME.  Maintainer of comp.mail.mh and news.software.nn FAQs.
If you're passed on the right, you're in the wrong lane.


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