Weekly edition	Kernel	Security	Distributions	Contact Us	Search
Archives	Calendar	Subscribe	Write for LWN	LWN.net FAQ	Sponsors

Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Posted May 26, 2004 16:47 UTC (Wed) by hchristeller (guest, #4246)
Parent article: Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

I'd like to thank the authors for the best explanation of the issues that I've yet seen. I wish that I'd had this a week ago. It should have been in the release notes.

There's one part that I still don't understand. If Linux doesn't use the CHS values in the partition table, then why does anaconda change them?

(Log in to post comments)

Posted May 26, 2004 20:52 UTC (Wed) by spot (subscriber, #15640) [Link]

Short answer: Because anaconda uses parted, and parted expects the disk geometry from the kernel to be accurate.

Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Posted May 29, 2004 8:33 UTC (Sat) by cliff22 (guest, #21930) [Link]

HEY - what if you dont install grub on the MBR but install grub on the root partition for Fedora instead? Then install the GAG bootloader on the MBR and use GAG to choose your windows or Fedora.

This way Fedora and Grub never write to the MBR. Will that stop the partition table from being changed (in a way that affects windows)? or does the problem also happen if the fedora installer creates or changes a partition??? Whats not clear to me is when the partition table gets screwed up, is it by grub or the fedora partition program?

I have been using the GAG boot loader for a while now on many machines and it really makes life simple. Check it out at http://gag.sourceforge.net/

Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Posted May 29, 2004 23:07 UTC (Sat) by surhudm (guest, #21939) [Link]

Check out :

http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=115980#c104 and
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=115980#c105

Surhud

Making Fedora Core 2 and Windows play well together

Posted Sep 4, 2004 7:38 UTC (Sat) by SFX (guest, #24508) [Link]

This is just a quick recovery tip for anybody who has accidentally hosed their system by using the xP Recovery Console prior to finding out about this fix: You can recover your NTFS data by using a Mac running OS 10.3.5. It reads NTFS out of the box. If you are using a ATA drive you can configure it as a slave in a G4 and it will mount the drive automatically on boot, or you can use a IEEE 1394 drive case (which is your all around best best). If you're using a SATA drive you either need a G5 or a IEEE 1394 case with an SATA interface. Trust me that this a quick, easy resolution to the problem because you can extract your data from the drive and back it up to the host, format the drive (you can even zero all data or do an 8 way overwrite) and then set up partitions and format them with MS-DOS FAT32 filesystem and put your data back on a secondary partition and do a clean reinstall. Then you can move your data back over afterwords, see this site for a description of supported filesystems in OSX:

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_fs.html

If you have access to a Mac to do this, then do it. It won't take that long. Data recovery on a Mac is easy, everybody should keep one around somewhere just for that alone. Don't be prejudiced, like I said before, it's all *nix now ;-)