On Wednesday 24 March 2004 11:11 am, Chuck Mattsen wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 04:08, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > - From the PM point of view, create your fat32 partition for data
> > immediately after the ntfs partition - you could do this from XP
> > instead, I think.  For the rest of the drive just ignore it in PM.
>
> Okay, that's where the free space is, and where the FAT32 partition will
> be.  My question where that is concerned is that if I create another
> "primary drive" (e.g., "F:"), would that in any way affect my dual-boot
> status if it's just going to be used for data accessible to both
> systems?

Not sure that I am following this question entirely, but just to mention a 
possible issue.  You can only have one primary partition per hard drive.  All 
other partitions under windows need to be created as extended partitions 
split into whatever logical drives you want.  Logical drives don't need to 
follow any particular convention, at least not for XP, they can be lettered 
in any way and the order is not dependent.  (For instance, you can have a D: 
drive that appears physically before the C: drive on a disk.  But, if you 
create a second primary partition, it will either be hidden or it will take 
the place of the first primary partition.  If you are creating additional 
drives within already defined space, then hopefully, the primary partition 
only extends to the first drive on the disk and subsequent space is already 
included in the extended partition.

Personally, if I were going to create an additional FAT32 partition for 
sharing, I would create the partition with Linux.  Windows should have no 
problem seeing and letting you use the partition and even assigning a drive 
letter to it.  Partition Magic allows you to do some things that you 
shouldn't do in the interest of allowing experts to do things like creating 
hidden mirror partitions on a drive, etc.

The added benefit to this is that diskdrake won't allow you to create multiple 
primary partitions and short of deleting an existing partition, shouldn't 
harm your windows partition in any way.  At least, not in my experience.  I 
have, however, managed to take out a Windows installation more than once 
using PM, nothing that couldn't be recovered but it was a hassle.
-- 
Bryan Phinney
Software Test Engineer

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