Large HD and VMWare's raw partitions

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

Subba Rao wrote:
> 
> One of my Linux system has a slave disk which is 20GB.
> 
> (0)root at myhost:/~# fdisk /dev/hdc
> 
> The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 2646.
> There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
> and could in certain setups cause problems with:
> 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
> 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
>    (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)
> 
> Command (m for help)
> 
> (0)root at myhost:~/
> 
> The disk partitions at the begining of the disk are Linux ext2 filesystems.
> Four partitions at the end of the disk are FAT16/msdos. The DOS partitions
> have been defined in /etc/fstab but at bootup time, these file systems are
> not getting mounted. I cannot even mount them manually. When I tried to mount
> them,
>         mount -t auto /dev/hdc5 /msdos
> 
> then the filesystem is mounted as a ext2 filesystems. When I try to mount them
> as msdos filesystems,
> 
>         mount -t msdos /dev/hdc5 /msdos
> 
> then the following message appears:
> 
> mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc5,
>        or too many mounted file systems
> 
> The goal is to create a raw partition for VMWare on the /dev/hdc5 partition and
> install NT over it rely on M$ systems.
> 
> How can I create raw partitions for VMware on large HDs and mount them?

It looks like the problem is that the partitions really have ext2
filesystems on them. Linux doesn't look at the partition type (the thing
you set in fdisk when you create the partition) when it mounts a
filesystem; it looks at the actual contents of the partition.

If you really want to have MSDOS filesystems on your hard disk (which
can be handy on a dual or multi-boot system), you have to use mkdosfs or
DOS/Windows FORMAT to prepare them. This will wipe out any files that
may already live in those partitions, so copy anything you care about to
another partition first.

If you're using NT 4.0, you're stuck with FAT16 or NTFS (which Linux
also supports) for this purpose. If you were dual-booting Windows 2000
instead, you could also use FAT32 - but then you couldn't use NTFS,
because the Linux NTFS code doesn't have write support for the latest
version of NTFS (the one used by Windows 2000) yet.
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