Duggan Dieterly said: > while cfdisk will work with big disks, it will not work with the > partition table created by windows 98. in order to use partitoions bigger > than 2GB with windows 98, you must use the FAT32 partition scheme.
Again, it seemed to work fine for me. On an ~8 Gb drive with (IIRC) 1043 cylinders, I had the whole thing formatted out as a single FAT32 partition. The version of cfdisk on the Debian install disks reported the drive as having a corrupt partition table, but the current Potato cfdisk displayed it just fine. I used Partition Magic to shrink the Win98 partition and free up some space at the end. The current cfdisk then allowed me to create a partition in that space and wrote out the partition table. (It also allowed me to go back a little later and delete that partition.) I didn't use cfdisk to create or modify the Win98 partition, which may well be relevant, but I did use it to modify a partition table including an over-2GB FAT32 partition and Win98 still boots and runs off that partition without any problems at all. > i could not get cfdisk to work with > this partition table when i went to create linux partitions on my disk. > fdisk did work with the windows 98 FAT32 partition table. Oddly enough, I tried fdisk on that drive before bringing out cfdisk (it was actually unintentional; I'd assumed that 'fdisk' would be symlinked to cfdisk) and fdisk refused to have anything to do with it. > so, i conclude, and i've heard from others on this group, that cfdisk will > not work in this case. if you don't need a dual boot system, then cfdisk > will work fine with big disks. just change the disk geometry in expert mode. > in fdisk or cfdisk. Maybe you're using the same version of cfdisk as the Debian install disks? I didn't have to go into expert mode or deal with disk geometry directly at all. > as far as the swap partition problem goes, i'm not sure. did you make sure > that you changed the id to the swap id on the partition (82, i think)? Yep, it was set as Linux swap. And don't forget that mke2fs refused to deal with the higher cylinders (on that machine's other hard drive) too. I wasn't able to put either data or swap out beyond cylinder 1023. > did you initialize the swap space? Isn't that what mkswap does?
