1 Topic by wtdoor

  • wtdoor
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Topic: Repartitioning creates Local Disks with 0 bytes in XP Pro

Hello,

I hope this is the right place to ask this question ... I repartitioned my new hard drive on a laptop running XP Pro to get ready to dual-boot linux.  I first shrank the NTFS partition from ~93 GB to ~50 GB and rebooted.  XP performed the system check, and I could see my smaller C: drive as expected in XP.  I then used Gparted to create a FAT32 partition and a set of logical partitions containing SWAP and ext3 filesystems.  When I rebooted into XP, I had one 'phantom' Local Disk for each SWAP and ext3 filesystem I had created earlier.  Each of these disks was described as a RAW filesystem with 0 bytes.  The FAT32 partition was also there, but with the expected properties.  If I took a look with the Disk Management tool , it only showed me the C: (NTFS) drive and the D: (FAT32) drive.  Does anyone know what has caused this? 

The motivating factor here was the installation of FC5 as the dual-boot distribution.  I saw the same thing happen post-FC5 installation.  I thought this might have been an issue with the FC5 installation, so I reformatted the hard drive, re-installed XP, and just played around with the partitioning using Gparted -- lo and behold, I saw the same type of behavior.

Thanks for your help!

Regards ....

2 Reply by plors

  • plors
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Re: Repartitioning creates Local Disks with 0 bytes in XP Pro

Hi, can you show us the output of 'fdisk -lu' and if possible a screenshot from gparted (see http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/ti … nshot.htm)

I think it's normal windows doesn't show the correct information for linuxspecific partitions (ext3 and swap), but i'm not sure.

3 Reply by wtdoor

  • wtdoor
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Re: Repartitioning creates Local Disks with 0 bytes in XP Pro

plors,

Thanks for the reply; I'll try to do that when I get home this evening.  The only other dual-boot systems I've done have been with two hard drives, so I guess that this could be standard behavior I just have not seen before ...

Regards ...

4 Reply by LarryT

  • LarryT
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Re: Repartitioning creates Local Disks with 0 bytes in XP Pro

Hy wtdoor,
I have installed many fc with dual boot (or more), and since i have something to do with GParted, i used it each time. smile . I never met any problem of those you got.
Anyway, the best to install fc is to set logical partition and then create your partition when installing fc....

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)