mkdosfs problems...

Riley Williams (rhw@bigfoot.com)
Wed, 10 Jun 1998 18:36:19 +0100 (BST)


Hi Daniel.

*** Daniel Kobras <belbo@???.extern.uni-tuebingen.de> may have said...

> I've put a modified version of mkdosfs on my webpage. This will
> allow formatting media with 2048 bytes per sector as well. The
> syntax is similar to mke2fs.

That suggests you're the maintainer of the mkdosfs package, so I'm
wondering if you can advise me regarding some problems I've been
haviong with it. I would have sent this direct, except the message I
found the above comment in had three different email addy's for you,
and all three bounced 8-(((

Basically, I have been trying to set up some Research Machines
P166/MMX systems with multiple partitions on their hard drive,
consisting of the following combination:

Q> /dev/hda1 Vfat Windows C: 500 Meg
Q> /dev/hda2 Extend
Q> /dev/hda3 Linux Linux Swap 120 Meg
Q> /dev/hda4 * Linux Linux 500 Meg
Q> /dev/hda5 Vfat Windows D: 500 Meg
Q> /dev/hda6 Vfat Windows E: 500 Meg

The systems in question are all networked, and the network bootrom
starts with a menu asking whether to boot from hard disk (RedHat Linux
5.0 using kernel 2.0.33) or download a boot image over the local net
(Windows 3.11), so that side of it is working fine.

However, when it comes to actually partitioning the hard disks, I find
the following:

1. fdisk will quite happily set up the correct partition table on
the disk, and write its results out. However, when it quits,
the system never resync's correctly, so it's necessary to reboot
and restart the install at that point.

2. After the reboot, I can quite happily mke2fs and mkswap the two
Linux partitions, and install Linux therein. I can also list the
three vfat partitions as /dos/[cde] and include them in /etc/fstab
with no problem.

3. If I use mkdosfs to format the vfat partitions, the next time that
I do a power-off reboot, the partition table has screwed up and
now reads as follows:

Q> /dev/hda1 Vfat Windows C: 500 Meg
Q> /dev/hda2 Extend
Q> /dev/hda3 Linux Linux Swap 120 Meg
Q> /dev/hda4 * Linux Linux 500 Meg
Q> /dev/hda5 ??? ??? 1900 Gig

Note that if I refrain from using mkdosfs to format the three vfat
partitions, but instead format them from an MSDOS boot floppy, this
problem does NOT occur, but if I format ANY of them using mkdosfs,
it fails as stated above...

Any advice much appreciated...

Best wishes from Riley.

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