Is this disk partition stable?

[FUBAR]

I'm a little skeptical of this working, only because it took me a few screwed up partition tables with version 6.2 of RedHat to get here. Also, putting the whole linux partition in the extDOS over 8 gig didn't work too good. The whole FAT for the drive/partitions went to hell. Here's what I did:

I had the RH 7.0 discs and a blank 27.3G hd (fresh off of a low level format.) I then loaded linux up on a 2.5 gig partition with a 133MB swap (128 RAM).

I then blew away my swap and the extended partition that was put there by linux and did a dos FDISK to put a 5.5 gig primary windows partition on. Then I made a ext DOS partition over the rest of the drive and made a couple of partitions in there leaving 133 meg open. Formatted all DOS, installed Win98.

Now I re-installed rh7 on the first partition and made my swap at the very end. My table looks like this:

hda1 => 2.5GB Linux
hda2 => 5.5GB FAT32
hda3 => ext dos partition holding:
hda5=> ~8GB FAT32
hda6=> ~9GB FAT32
hda7=> 133MB Linux swap

MBR => Lilo
booting linux on hda1
windows on hda2

Does this have any chance of being stable? It looks ok now, but I don't have the luxury of letting this thing go bad in the near future. I have my data backed up on another machine, but that will be unavailable after tomorrow...

 

[Louie1961]

Looks ok to me, but I haven't played with Red Hat 7 yet. My only question would be, "where did you put the 16 MB /boot drive?"

I just reformatted my HDD to install win 98, and what I did was this:

1. Partitioned with FDISK (dos), creating one drive on the entire partition (FAT32)

2. Installed win 98 per usual procedure, and set up windows as desired

3. From within windows, installed partition magic and boot magic

4. Used partition magic from windows to resize my primary partition, and create four new drives in logical partition: 16 MB Linux boot drive (ext2), 133 MB Linux swap drive, 2.8Gig Linux ext2 (/ mount), and a 700MB fat 16 drive shared by windows and linux, mounted as /Home

5. Loaded lilo to beginning of linux drive, instead of MBR

Works great

 

[FUBAR]

a /boot partition is optional everywhere that I know of. I did try to use the method of putting a ~50 meg drive below the 8 gig limit (yes, I know it's really the 1024 cyl limit) but that was with rh 6.2 and it still wasn't too happy. I might have done something wrong with that too though.

I know that logically this should work ok, except for the fact that the swap and the data drives are on opposite ends of the drive so that could make it kinda funky if I ever load up a lotta $hite.

I don't think this would be any different than other versions of linux, even the old ones. The major thing is if anything is gonna screw with my mbr or corrupt my FAT again. (me crossing fingers)

 

[Klosters]

Win9x must be in the 1st partition(C:\) of your Master drive on IDE channel 1. I suggest using Linux's fdisk program to create a partition table that looks like: C:\, aka /dev/hda1, Type "c" Win FAT32, 7 Gigs. /dev/hda2, Type "82," Linux Swap, 133 Mb. /dev/hda3, Type "83," Linux Native, 6 Gigs. /dev/hda4, Type "c," FAT32, ~17 Gigs, or whatever is needed to use all the rest of the space on the drive.

 

[Damaged]

Wrong. First primary FAT partition.

 

[FUBAR]

Well, I know it doesn't HAVE to be the first partition cuz it's booting now, I'm just wondering if there's any forseeable problems in here that could cause it to think twice and screw up the partition table.

Damaged, do you mean below the extended partition?? Please elaborate.

It seems to be working now (knock on wood)

 

[Damaged]

Okay, first, there's nothing wrong with your partition setup. Stable? Yeah, sure, why not. I mean it will work.

What I meant was that the first primary FAT partition relates to where you can install Windows. The Windows boot files (allof about 4MB) must reside in the first primary FAT partition on the first physical drive.

 

[FUBAR]

I ask because a previous 6.2 install with a /boot below 8gig and the rest somewhere else resulted in a corrupt something or other that caused the drive to go to hell. And a previous 7 install with everything above 8 caused random hd errors and my last win partition to become unusable.