[Glastonbury] NTFS -> FAT32

[tim hall]

Thanks for all your responses.
I reckon that should be enough clues. If not, I'll bring it to the meeting 
singing the "Read Head Carol" - "A Hard Drive in hand bear I ..."
:-)

Last Tuesday 30 November 2004 13:02, Alistair Parsons was like:
> coming from a windows background, i would tend to remove the NTFS using
> a mandrake install CD, then create the FAt32 using win98 fdisk from a
> boot disk

That does make sense, I can probably translate that.

Last Tuesday 30 November 2004 13:17, Greg Browne was like:
> Tim
> Are you sure that you have written zeros to the whole drive or rather
> zero (or low level format) over all partition and boot information? If
> you haven't then maybe that is where your problem lies as I have had
> similar problems with drives when not all the information has been
> removed. Just removing partition information with partition software
> is often insufficient in my experience (always meant to investigate
> exactly where this information is kept).

It's possible that the boot sector was larger than 1024 bytes, yes. I wrote 
1024 zeros to a file and dd'd that to hdd1 and hdd5. It's possible I was a 
bit clumsy with the chisel ;-]

> If you don't have access to a tool like PCCheck, 

Let me guess, I bet it doesn't come with Debian ;-)

Last Tuesday 30 November 2004 19:53, Andrew M.A. Cater was like:
> Windows at one time had a 2G limit (DOS), then an 8G. Are you absolutely
> sure you're not hitting something like that?  A DR DOS 7 bootdisk on floppy
> and fdisk /mbr ought to do it - followed by a Linux cfdisk.

No, in fact I suspect that that is possibly my major problem now. Debian 
doesn't recognise any initial sector on the drive. I'll try smaller 
partitions.

cheers

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk