linux fucked win

[Master of Reality]

somehow i think linux fucked up my windows partiton. I had on HDB a linux, linux swap, 100MB free then win partitions. I installed Red Hat, went into windows afterwards, and it worked. I went into red hat and then windows again today. I find out that my win partition has lost the files that were on it, and in its place is odd named files, some a lot of them said text, font, etc. I tried to go into a folder, and win says it doesnt exist. Windows now crashes whenever i try to look at that partition. I cant even format it. I never heard of linux doing anything to windows before.
  :confused:  

...
If i want to install mandrake (with my redhat still on) can they share swap partitions?

The kpackage program seems to be "evil" It says that the dependency check failed when i try to un/install anything. How do i uninstall the GNOME GUI?

[ April 04, 2002: Message edited by: Master of Reality ]

[Centurian]

Hey,

Sounds to me as if the hard disk info tables (I'm at a loss for the correct word at the moment) are screwed up.

Try running Scandisk in windows on the bad partition and see what kind of errors it produces.

I would suggest you re-partition and re-install. However someone may have a better solution.

[Brent]

On your drive, is windows first or linux?  From my experience, windows does not like to have anything installed before it. If installed after linux it tends to try to overwrite files.. Seems strange as one is fat32 and the other ext2, but it has happened to me before also. As long as I install windows first, then linux, then another linux in a totally seperate set of partitions, I dont have any problem. The lilo bootloader recognizes all 3 and you have a triple boot system. I wouldnt recommend trying to share the redhat swap file with mandrake. I would install mandrake as a totally seperate entity. The easiest way to remove redhat and start over is to start the install over again and when you get to the point where you can format the disc, delete the partitions containing linux. Then eject the cdrom before it goes any further.  If you have partition magic it is a lot easier, but it can be done. You may have to use fdisc to get rid of the windows partition, im not sure. If you have partition magic you could just move the partition with windows to the front and reinstall over it. Then you would have an unused partition that you can install linux in.  Maybe a roundabout way of doing things but it works for me.  Hope that helps

[Master of Reality]

linux doesnt even seem to be mounting that partition, its like it doesnt exist under linux.

[voidmain]

Did you "tell" Linux to mount your windows partition? If your Win partition is FAT32 and it's on the first partition of an IDE hard drive just do this as root:

# mkdir /c
# mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /c
# cd /c
# ls -alp

You should see your Windows files. If you do, add the mount to your /etc/fstab file which should look something like this:

/dev/hda1 /c vfat uid=501,gid=501,umask=007 0 0
 
Where "uid" is your userid number from /etc/passwd and "gid" is your group number from /etc/group. Or if you just want everyone to have read write access add it this way:

/dev/hda1 /c vfat umask=000 0 0