Re: [PLUG] Accessing a FAT32 drive from Linux

[George Langford <amenex@amenex.com>]

Hello Plug !

Here's some more information.

The BookPC's BIOS is perfectly happy with both the 40GB and 80GB
Maxtor drives on the same cable - The 80GB's in the middle as
Slave and the 40GB's at the end as Master.  The former middle 
resident is the CD burner, sorely needed ...  The BookPC is a
low end PC whose main claim to fame was that it could be bought
without an installed OS.  No second IDE controller.  So the only
choice is to use one of the four USB ports to access that 80GB
drive on a more permanent basis. Unfortunately, my Adstech USB
2.0 Drive Kit doesn't support Linux AFAIK.

I can change the BIOS settings easily to make this a dual boot
system - on an either/or basis. That's how I discovered that the
80GB drive still has a good copy of W98SE on it - except for the 
fact that it's now an incomplete install, as the original AK74-EC
installation used this 80GB drive as the clone of the Primary
80GB drive using XXCopy to do the cloning.  That's also how their
drive letters got swapped ... forever, it seems.  See this URL
for the more complete but unsatisfying story of all that I tried:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Win98/Q_20642131.html

What I'm discovering is that Red Hat Linux chokes when it tries to 
detect the 80GB drive - and there's no opportunity to mount it along 
with the floppy drive when I right-click on the display [desktop ?].  
I need to work out a command-line syntax to tell Linux what file 
system to look for. That's when I get all glassy-eyed.

Thanks to Jeff for helping me decide that the W98SE/WinXP mess
wasn't worth saving.  None of the participants here, on Experts-X,
or anywhere else on the 'Net ever solved the sorts of error
messages that I was getting - Hall.dll hosed; fdisk giving me
the rong disk size, proprietary file system.  Heck, I even tried
deleting the Windows directory from the other 80GB drive - it
let me try & went through the motions, but it was all still there
to get in the way of a W98SE reinstall after all was said and done.

Best regards,
George Langford
amenex@amenex.com
http://www.amenex.com/
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