Peter -- I've made some detailed comments below. But the bottom line is that
you have a Windows problem, not a Linux problem. This Windows problem may
have a Linux solution ... but Linux is not the obvious place to start. You
should first turn to whatever recovery tools you have for Windows --
whatever today's descendent is of programs like Norton Disk Doctor -- to try
to recover your lost D: drive before exploring Linux solutions.
I notice that the Phat site promises "Easy Windows Installation Great
Technical Support and more!" on the order page. Caveat emptor, I guess! Pfui!
At 09:50 AM 5/13/00 +0000, pfheiss wrote [in part]:
>
>Many thanks to all for trying to help me. I added the answers to all your
>questions below. I might have to mention yet that I used Linux fdisk to
>create the e: partion on my second hard drive as System Win95 FAT32.
Oh. This *may* be the source of your problems.
Last I knew, fdisk didn't work right when making msdos (FAT16) partitions
... some argument about Microsoft not following its own standard, and by
golly, fdisk was gonna follow the standard even if the resulting partition
didn't work with DOS or Windows. The (current) man page for fdisk offers
this advice:
The bottom line is that if you use cfdisk or fdisk to
change the size of a DOS partition table entry, then you
must also use dd to zero the first 512 bytes of that par�
tition before using DOS FORMAT to format the partition.
The conventional wisdom for a long time was to make your msdos partition
with MSDOS fdisk, then do the rest with Linux fdisk. Anyone know if this
problem carried over to FAT32?
[skipping a lot]
>So ... what do you mean, Peter, by "half way the installation"? Do you mean
>un-zip'ing the file to \phat\ ? Or were you folloing the README instructions
>for what to do after it's unzipped?
>
>-- I was following the README instruction for installion under DOS from
> the cdrom. The installation started and by the time it stalled judging
> from my other Linux installations it might have been half way through.
>
>If the first, that's happening under DOS or Windows, not Linux ... we won't
>be much help on that.
>
>If the second, you'll need to be a lot more specific about what you were
>doing. What "did the README tell you to do, and what happened just before
>the "invalid media type" message appeared?
>
>-- It says quote: If you are installing from DOS or Win3x to install you
> run the following from the CD:
> unzip phatv32.zip -d e:\phat unquote
>
> It then started to transfer the files and just stopped with that
> message from DOS
At this point, which OS is running? Since you use \ rather than / for the
directory indicator, I'll assume the upzipping is being done under DOS (or a
DOS Window), not Linux. So ... what happens is that a DOS program, upzip,
fails partway through the process of unzipping a DOS .zip file to a DOS
directory. To recover from this, you should be using DOS/Win tools to
recover a lost Windows-style partition. Fixing this with Linux is realy
going the long way around. Get one of the standard Windows recovery tools,
whatever the current-day equivalent to Norton Disk Doctor is.
One long-shot thought: In Linux, when your partition table fails, all the
actual stuff is still out there on the disk. If you are careful and lucky,
you can use Linux fdisk to create a "new" set of partitions on the disk that
are identical to the old, "lost" partitions. If you then mount the
partitions, without putting ext2 filesystems on them, you sometimes find the
"lost" partitions are found. You might be able to pull off something with
the Windows version of fdisk ... but I'd recommend looking for advice
someplace where WIndows expertise is more prevalent before actually trying it.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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