Well thanks gentoo!!!!

[Joe]

Damnit after fiddling around with gentoo it changed the "alignment" of my windows drives and as such over 40 gb of my stuff has become corrupt. Music, movies, games....and assignments!!! all gone.... Are there many more dangers I should be aware of when trying to install Gentoo?? Is it always going to have an affect on the windows drives when I create Ext3 partitions?? Sorry to whinge but I had to say something!!!!

[huw]

[huw]

hmm that sounds more stroppy than I meant it to be.

[Joe]

Well, I followed everything to plan according to the install instructions using a stage 3 tarball. The only thing I can see that could have had any impact is using fdisk to make the partitions, and even then, I didn't change any parameters to the previous partitions... I posted because I'm stumped to why it happened. I managed to repair 3 of my DIVX movies but everything else is gone, and I'm wondering if I try again will I lose more.... I know it sounds whiny but I'm hoping someone could have some insight that's all...

thanks

[huw]

Yes fdisk is almost certainly what went wrong. If you don't use fdisk again and you have your /etc/fstab set up so any windows partitions you want to mount under linux are mounted read-only then I can't think of any way you could corrupt the partitions.

If you need read-write acces to a partition to share data between windows and linux I think vfat is your only option as NTFS write support is *very* experimental - last time I looked anyway.

HTH

[lx]

[Joe]

What I meant by the partitiones are "misaligned" is that after setting my partitions in fdisk (ie, I made hda7:boot, hda8:swap and hda9:root), and running all the other commands that, after re-starting, my windows partitions C,D,E are said to be starting and ending at "unexpected points", when Scandisk tried to repair this in XP it marked about 95% of my files as lost clusters.... and hence I lost those files...

I used the regular commands with fdisk, I created new partitions, chose them as logical, determined their size, then designated their type (82 for swap etc.).

I understand the linux partitions aren't accessible through windows (though I can see them with partitionmagic. I really don't want any contact between the windows and linux filesystems (to avoid problems like this) but now I guess I don't have a choice lol.... well one positive is that it solved my dilemma of choosing whether to format the E drive haha.

[klieber]

[james]

Try this instead.

XP sucks and doesn't like anything else on the partition.

Period.
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17 Opps It's 19 now Gentoo's and counting

[klieber]

[Guest]

Ok, well to clarify some things...

I adjusted the size of my 3 windows partitions on my 60GB drive to leave 6GB free for gentoo. I'm using Partition Magic 7 to do this and all was fine and dandy. I didn't even attempt to load Gentoo on the same partition as XP... as klieber said, that would be plain silly. I'm using FAT32 for my windows partitions (as I'm dual booting 98 and XP), and I'm more than likely going to use Ext3 for Gentoo, though if anyone knows some reasons to use Ext2 instead I'll use that.

[huw]

I'm sure someone had a problem like this before - was posted ages ago. They used partition magic to resize and then fdisk didn't like the partition table it had made. From what you posted I would guess that somehow the new partition table you wrote after using fdisk didn't have the same boundaries as the partitions made by P.M. That is the only way I can think of corrupting all 3 windoze partitions. Now why this happened is beyond me (having never used P.M). I'll see if I can find the post on here....

The stuff about XP and Linux on the same HD is rubbish - it came from a badly written article on one of the big linux websites written by an journalist who doesn't understand that "System Recovery" CDs do just what they say - recover your system - He used an XP one and unsurprisingly it removed linux partitions from his hard-drive.

[lain iwakura]

not sure what you mean by "alignment" still, but I had a similar problem using partition magic with win98. when I first loaded up PM after installing gentoo (i wanted to shrink a fat32 partition to add more space for gentoo!), PM was stating there were some errors -- can't remember exactly what, but I said "yes" to all of them to fix it.

long story short, it just f*ed up my boot sector -- noticed that when rebooting. (grrr.) used win2000 boot cd in the console to fix that.

blah blah, moral?

BACK UP!!! Norton Ghost is a nice (commercial) product that makes imaging your hd/partitions a snap. with my exp, it doesn't work well with NTFS partitions, though. damn shame, too. anyways, uh, my point....
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[resident anime junkie] -- not just a linux freak.

[Remco]

Hmm, as I get it it all broke due to PM. I will tell you something: that is not new! two years ago or something I lost both my windows partitions after a resizing operation. In many cases PM will do it's job, but I have heard enough reports of PM breaking something to know that it might break stuff every once in a while (which is the reason I don't use it anymore).

[cherry]

so what would you use instead? i mean, is fdisk able to resize NTFS filesystems? is there any other *good* *noncommercial* partitioning application?

[maystorm]

"GNU Parted" (PARtition EDitor) comes to mind, check it out here:

http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html

Great alternative to Partition Magic; I used it a lot to resize ext2's and FAT's without probs (so far).

However, it wouldn't allow to resize NTFS in its current version...
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Linux user #216018

[klieber]

[Joe]

Actually Klieber, I've been using Partition Magic for the last few months to rearrange and resize (XP) NTFS partitions, I just hadn't experienced any data corruption until now. So if anyone wants to try it just be a bit wary though it did work fine for me for over 6 months....

[klieber]

[Guest]

Oh FREE, sorry missed that bit. I'm still going to give Gentoo a go though, as I have practically nothing to lose now LOL. I'm still having a problem with modprobing the 3c59x network card though... but I've put that in another post....

[Joe]

I just had one other thought.... So far when I've tried installing I've been unsuccessful and as such, just rebooted and went back to Win98 / XP. Could the fact that I didn't unmount my drives before restarting cause a problem perhaps??

[Xaanin]

Partition Magic works great performing small operations. But moving, resizing and creating 3 new partitions at once is just a no no. Lost my Windows program disk when trying =(

[kraylus]

for the love of all that is good and holy THIS is why gentoo should have cfdisk as an alternate option. sure, you can say whatever you like bout keeping out the newbies and all that but blah!

i dont even know how to use fdisk! i had to boot my slack cdrom, use cfdisk to create the gentoo partitions outlined in the installation guide and then proceed with gentoo install SANS fdisk. god i hate that app....

ryan
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I used gentoo BEFORE it was cool.

[Joe]

LOL @ Ryan, yeah it isn't the nicest thing but I'm catching onto the commands rather quick and I don't mind that it's text based (at least the install i mean). I haven't yet gotten past the install yet I am making progress.. I have another question though.... when I check my network settings before I try and emerge rsync I get the following line

UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING where I'd much like to have
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST RUNNING

and with this I'm told that Loopback is up and running....

I've used modprobe 8139too and then set my dhcp and then set all the others using /sbin/ifconfig and edited resolv.conf so I'm not sure what else I can do...

[Remco]