Re: Resizing FAT32 produces unexpected results

[Andrew Clausen]

Teppo Peltonen wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have a IBM Thinkpad A20p with Windows 2000 installed. The laptop
> uses a 17G IBM hard disk. There was one large FAT32 partition.
> 
> I defragmented the drive using disk tools from windows and then tried
> to reduce it´s size by four megs to install a Linux on it. I booted
> using the partboot-1.4.2.img disk image from ftp.gnu.org.

You don't need to defragment with Parted.

> When I started parted, it warned me about the disk geometry,
> 2343/240/63 and said that cylinder 1024 ends at 7559.999M. I found no
> way to check the geometry from the BIOS. However, a Windows
> diagnostics utility included with the laptop installation gave similar
> information and I ignored the warning.
> 
> Here´s the output of the print command:
> 
> Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0.000-17297.929 megabytes
> Disk label type: msdos
> Minor   Start   End     Type Filesystem    Flags
> 1       0.031   17297.929       primary FAT     boot,lba
> 
> (Sorry for typos, copied those by hand.)

Thanks for making the effort!

> Then I said
> 
> resize 1 0.031 13269.445
> 
> The hard disk worked for a while. Then an error message appeared,
> something about a file being really 1K and taking 80K. Sorry, didn´t
> take that one up. I said "Ignore" and the hard disk continued to work
> for something like 10 or 15 minutes. Finally, the hard disk stopped
> and no messages were displayed. I said "quit" and tried to boot back
> to Windows to check that everything was ok.

This is weird.  Can you remember the name of the file?

(BTW, Parted says nothing on success)

> The boot sequence stopped early on an error message:
> 
> Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or
> corrupt:
> windows 2000 root\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
> Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Ouch!  You don't happen to know if it's the same file as above?

Also, did you have boot DOS off a floppy, and have a look at
this file?  If not, is it possible to repeat the experiment?

(eg: is the ntoskrnl.exe the size it's supposed to be?  Can
you send both versions to me?)
 
> Now, what did I miss? Backed all the data up, but still a bit annoying
> ;-/.
> 
> Fdisk from Redhat 7.0 installation cd thinks that the hda1 partition
> is FAT16. Is that normal? Don´t know what it said before the
> resizing...

Well, it may have converted to FAT16... (it's hard to tell from
the numbers) - but I doubt it... 

Also weird.

Thanks! 
Andrew Clausen