Spongebob wrote:
Earlier you said you're using Win98; here's a blurb from http://www.v-com.com/support/sup_os_Win98.html that may or may not be relevant:Chris Lale wrote:On Sun, 2005-01-23 at 19:03 -0500, Spongebob wrote:This is really bizzare. First drive, hda 1 ext2 (1G) 2 vfat (20G) D: 3 extended 5 vfat (20G) F: 6 ext2 (20G) 7 ext2 (20G) 8 ext2 (2.8G) 9 vfat (20G) G: 4 ext2 (56G) Second drive, hdd 1 vfat (5G) C: 2 swap (2G) 3 ext2 (10G) 4 vfat (22G) H: All of the vfats show up in windows, with the letters given above. Additionally, I get an E:, with a size that corresponds to H:. I can acces E:, format it, and even write files to it. When I reboot, the files are still there. In all respects, it behaves like a real drive. But there's no partition for it! Looking in linux, the files added to E: in windows aren't there. Go back to windows and there they are. It shows up in the windows System Information window with "logical information" but no "physical information". Does anyone have any idea what this is about?I seem to remember that someone mentioned recently on the list that Windows has an unfixed bug: it creates a non-existent drive letter if the last extended partition is not a windows partition. Hth ChrisThe last extended partition is hda9, which is a windows partition.
• The boot portion of Windows 98 can only be installed onto the first physical drive. The Windows 98 boot record always reads sectors from the first physical hard drive, and will behave unpredictably when booted from another physical hard drive.• Windows 98 cannot be installed into an extended or logical partition. It will only boot from a Primary FAT partition.• A bug in Windows 98 will prevent access to multiple primary partitions if the last logical partition on every drive is not FAT. Thus, if you create a primary partition for Windows 98, a second primary partition for MS-DOS, then install Windows 2000 into an extended partition using NTFS, your Windows 98 will have problems accessing the MS-DOS partition. If you create a logical DOS drive after the NTFS drive, Windows 98 will not have any problems accessing the MS-DOS partition.• We recommend that if installing into the MultiFAT (where System Commander Resides) that only one Windows 95/98/Me be installed in that partition, since the Program Files directory overlaps. Installing DOS, NT/2000 or OS/2 in the same partition causes no problems.
Perhaps the differences between FAT16 and FAT32 may be relevant here. Or perhaps booting off the second drive is part of the unpredictable behaviour mentioned above. Just some thoughts.
-- Kent