I'm guessing that what you have done is create several primary
partitions, and that the vfat partition is not the first primary
partition. Windows is only going to want to live comfortably on the
first primary partition or on an extended partition.
Rather than worry about this most people just follow Craige's advice,
install Windows first on the first primary, and then install Linux,
carving up whatever space you have left as your needs suggest. Still,
it's not necessary, if you give windows what is wants.
The other reason people often install Windows first is because it likes
to overwrite the Master Boot Record (MBR) with it's own boot loader,
which of course, is retarded and can't see linux. So if you do install
Windows second, be /sure/ to make a boot disk, you'll need it to reboot
linux and rerun lilo to rewrite the MBR.
Again, it's possible to install in whatever order you like, but for your
first time, probably just easier to do windows first.
The last part of your problem is unusual. You may need to enter fdisk's
expert mode and make sure that physical and logical adresses agree.
cheers,
Martin
On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Murtuza Jadliwala wrote:
> Hi friends
> I was only a Win 9x user till I got to know the
> Power of Linux in my Office and planned to
> shift to linux in my Home PC. But I was not
> done with Windows yet since I had lot of
> Important data. So I decided to load a dual
> boot on my pc. I was plagued by the following
> problems
> 1) I partitioned my 6.4 GB hard drive using
> Linux fdisk as follows
> partition1 2000M Linux
> partition2 4000M win95/FAT32
> partition3 139 M Linux swap
>
> After partioning I started my Win98
> installation from the CDROM only to see that my
> c: was not accessible. I tried to format it and
> it says that The drive does not exist. It gives
> some vague errors. Basically I cannot format my
> Win95/FAT32 partition.
>
> Directly setting up from CDROM also doesnt
> work. It says the same thing that it cannot
> format c:
>
> Then I used Dos Fdisk to delete the existing
> Dos partition and created a new partition. It
> does not allocat the entire 4GB to the
> partition but only 200 MB
>
> Please help me and tell me the exact procedure
> for creating a Win98/Linux dual boot.
>
> --
> Murtuza J
> Systems Engineer
> Investment Research and Information Services Ltd
> visit us at www.myiris.com
>
>
>
> ________________________________________________________________
>
> This message was sent using Myiris Mail
> For more information visit http://mail.myiris.com
>
>
>
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