Fat32 Disk Partition

One of my plans is to explore the advantages/disadvantages of using a 
Fat32 partition and an unslung NSLU2 so have been experimenting with 
'Partition Magic version 8' to move partition boundaries and add some 
primary FAT32 space (just one partition).

This is a list of my findings.

The Maxtor drive (that I have) comes pre-formated FAT32,  the NSLU2 will 
wipe this partition and replace with the three Linux Partitions.  This 
seems to be unavoidable if the first three partitions in the partition 
table are not the Linux partitions.

The drive needs to be plugged back into a windows machine for Partition 
Magic to function.
You can;-
1.  Reduce the size of the Data partition.
2.  Move and Increase the size of the Conf partition (have increased 
mine from 117.7 MB to about 2000 MB).
3.  Add a Primary Fat32 partition,  is easiest to fit it between the 
Data and Conf partitions.  It will still show as the fourth Primary 
partition in the Drives partition Table.

This takes some time to complete (~ 60 mins on my XP P4 machine).

It would appear that you cannot change in any way the Swap partition, 
it seems to be fixed at 54.9 MB (although I think that the theoretical 
maximum should be 2048 MB).

You should now have a FAT32 partition that will show up and work under 
Windows when the drive is plugged into a Windows machine.

After plugging the drive back into the NSLU2,  the drive seems to 
function correctly.
Access to the FAT32 partition through the NSLU2 is covered in the Wiki.

Interestingly,  if you subsequently re-format the drive using the NSLU2 
then the FAT32 partition as added above will be left untouched and 
intact.

Also trying to subsequently change the partition sizes again using 
Partition Magic 8 seems to fail for unknown reasons,  the partitions 
seem to get corrupted and become unusable.  You can recover from this by 
deleting all partitions and starting again.


-- 
Robert Hammond
PGP:0x154144DA


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