> I've had recurrent failures trying to get FAT32 partitions created
> with these utilities in tomsrtbt to be recognised by windoze, to the
> point where I no longer trust them. I've also had fdisk do weird
> things with partitions tables on drives on the secondary IDE bus.
I think you are running into a known problem, which is mentioned in the
fdisk docs, which is a Windows problem. And which is _not_ fixed in a
newer version of fdisk... From the fdisk docs on tomsrtbt:
=========================================================================
DOS 6.x WARNING
The DOS 6.x FORMAT command looks for some information in
the first sector of the data area of the partition, and
treats this information as more reliable than the informa-
tion in the partition table. DOS FORMAT expects DOS FDISK
to clear the first 512 bytes of the data area of a parti-
tion whenever a size change occurs. DOS FORMAT will look
at this extra information even if the /U flag is given --
we consider this a bug in DOS FORMAT and DOS FDISK.
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.
For example, if you were using cfdisk to make a DOS parti-
tion table entry for /dev/hda1, then (after exiting fdisk
or cfdisk and rebooting Linux so that the partition table
information is valid) you would use the command "dd
if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1 bs=512 count=1" to zero the
first 512 bytes of the partition. BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL if
you use the dd command, since a small typo can make all of
the data on your disk useless.
BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL if you use the dd command, since a
small typo can make all of the data on your disk useless.
For best resutls, you should always use an OS-specific
partition table program. For example, you should make DOS
partitions with the DOS FDISK program and Linux partitions
with the Linux fdisk or Linux cfdisk program.
======================================================================
> If there's any possibility of upgrading the versions that are being
> used to the lastest and greatest stable versions, then that would be a
> GoodThing(tm) :)
See above... it sounds like this is your problem, not the linux fdisk...
> Also, there was an announcement in COLA about a month ago about new
> versions of mkdosfs and dosfsck. They also have a new maintainer, and
> a new home:
> ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/Linux/LOCAL/dosfstools
I will look into this, definitely.
-Tom
