FAT23

[WhoDeeny]

I'm trying to dual boot win2k & win98SE, however everything I've read in the MS knowledge base says that the prmary partition for Win98 shoud be FAT16 otherwise it won't work. Well I installed both OS's before knowing this and up until very recently I was having no problems. Now I've gotten S.M.A.R.T. errors telling me that drive is about to die and I'm also having problems installing software. So I'm trying now to fdisk (with the win98 startup disk) the drive to remove all partitions and start over with a FAT16 partition. Fdisk isn't working, something with the NTFS partition (I'm thinking) is keeping it from working at all so I tried it on another HD and although I made the partition 2G's its FAT32 and I never got any option to change it to FAT16. Is there some way to do this on my own and is my other drive really going to fail or its it errors generated b/c the DOS partition isn't FAT16 as recomended? Thanks for your help!

 

[thorin]

Win98 will install/run just fine on a FAT32 partition.

Your drive is probably dying RMA it, or replace it (do a backup first).

For all your partition/muti-filesystem needs get Partition Magic.

Thorin

 

[Sunner]

First of all, the primary partition can be FAT32, you don't need to touch FAT16 with Win98.

Secondly, SMART mostly sucks, I've seen it shut down computers with perfectly fine HD's, but I've never seen it actually do what it should.

Im not saying thats allways the case, but I've never found it worthwhile.

 

[ucla88]

i agree with thorin. fat32 is fine for 98 and w2k. using it shouldn't cause errors. most likely, your hdd is starting to fail. run the usual diagnostics for your hdd and back up your data. fdisk will sometimes have problems partitioning under a variety of situations. partition magic usually works when fdisk doesn't (though PM has occasionally failed me)

 

[corkyg]

Oh no-o-o-o-o!

This is the 4th Forum you have posted the same question. Definitely not cool!

But . . . the answers are all the same and consistent . . . FAT 32 is not a problem and is highly recommended for dual boot cases like you describe.

 

[WhoDeeny]

You got me! For that I sincerely apologize but I needed help and in the past many of my requests have gone unaswered. Thanks gain for all of your help and please forgive my redundancy!




<< Oh no-o-o-o-o!

This is the 4th Forum you have posted the same question. Definitely not cool!

But . . . the answers are all the same and consistent . . . FAT 32 is not a problem and is highly recommended for dual boot cases like you describe. >>

 

[thorin]

"You got me! For that I sincerely apologize but I needed help and in the past many of my requests have gone unaswered. Thanks gain for all of your help and please forgive my redundancy!"

Grumble....cross posting is very very bad, if you have to do it then it's most polite to apologize in your first crosspost (though you just shouldn't do it).

Thorin