fat

[Christian Mendl]

Hi you there,

as I wanted to install new programs on my windows partition, I needed
more space and tried to use parted (version 1.4.18) to expand my windows 
partition.
This is what fdisk /dev/hda p looks like now, after having used parted
and got some problems, which I'll describe later.

Disk /dev/hda 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2495 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot   Start      End      Blocks   Id
/dev/hda1        1         1        8001    83
/dev/hda2        2      1402    11253532+    c
/dev/hda3     1794      2495     5638815     f
/dev/hda5     1795      2430     5108668    83
/dev/hda6     2431      2495      522083    82

This is what fdisk p looks like in expert mode:

Nr Af  Hd Sec  Cyl  Hd Sec  Cyl    Start     Size  ID
1  00   1   1    0 254  63    0       63    16002  83
2  80   0   1    1 254  63  377    16065 22507065  0c
3  00   0   1 1023 254  63 1023 28804545 11277630  0f
4  00   0   0    0   0   0    0       0         0  00
5  00 254  63 1023 254  63 1023   16065  10217336  83
6  00 254  63 1023 254  63 1023      63   1044166  82

(By the way, fdisk v reports some errors: "partition 2 overlapping 5" and
"partition 5 not completely inside extended partition")

That's what parted prints out now:

table on /dev/hda inconsistent, using lba recommended

Minor   Start       End     Type   Filesystem     Flag
1       0.031     7.844   primary       ext2
2       7.844 10997.622   primary        FAT     boot, lba
3   14064.719 19571.374  extended                  lba
5   14072.563 19061.479   logical       ext2
6   19061.528 19571.374   logical linux-swap


When I used parted the first time on hda2 (my windows partition), I got
an error message: "Can't grow a partition onto used space", although
there was obviously free space. I figured out that hda1, which is my boot
partition and was 8032 blooks large at that time, didn't end on a
cylinder boundary, so I used fdisk to shrink that partition table entry
accordingly, without changing the file system. After that, parted worked
fine (no error messages), but I think that it moved hda2 a little bit
backward. Here comes the problem: Windows doesn't boot any more, although
I re-installed lilo. A fdisk /MBR in dos-mode didn't help neither (the
only thing it did was that it messed up my partition table and I had to
re-create it), so do you know what could help?

Thank you very much!

Christian Mendl

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