Quick Windows partition question

PhantomBeaker

If you're interested in the setup, see below:

Quick form of question - do modern versions of windows (2k and xp) still expect to see their partitions (i.e. ones they can read/write to) before those of any other OSs, or is it ok to mix and match these days?

Reason: I'm planning to put in another hard drive, and I'm wondering if a: the order of partitions on the drive makes any difference. and if it does matter, b: if it would still make a difference if one hard drive (arranged as below) and then the second drive was arranged similarly? (i.e. each are in order on each disk, but not in absolute order).

I know this used to be an issue in windows 95 and such, and to be honest, I've never paid attention to windows' subtleties since then. So are win xp (pro) and win2k as finnicky?

-- Arrangement of existing hard-drive
Currently I have a setup with win2k and win xp pro living on the first partition of my harddrive, the second formatted to fat 32(hda5), the next is a swap drive(hda6), next being my linux partition(hda7).
---

pdogs

Win2K/XP will only "see" FAT and NTFS partitions regardless of the OS that created them and whether or not any OS created them. The logical disk manager will add drive letters to all new "visible" volumes as they are added to the sytem according to a formula very similar to the rules for the DOS-based OSes. However, for all such visible fixed volumes, the drive letter assignments can be changed by the user; the exceptions being the system and boot partitions and those containing the pagefile.

The /dev/hda6 and /dev/hda7 volumes will be recognised as being "foreign" partitions but will not be accessible from Windows nor have a drive letter assigned to them.

After you add the new hard drive it makes no real difference to Windows what the arrangements are and you can customise the drive lettering for FAT/NTFS partitions to suit your own purposes. With DOS-based OSes it would be different since they are assigned dynamically and the user cant change the values.

One warning/gotcha is to not use fdisk /mbr on Win2K/XP sytems or the drive letters are liable to all be changed; only use fixmbr from the recovery console if you want to rewrite the bootstrap code of the mbr.

PhantomBeaker

Ok, cool. Basically, my main worry was if I had a partition of, say, reiserfs sandwiched between 2 ntfs partitions, that the second ntfs partition would be recognised and mounted.

I'm gathering from your reply is that it'd be fine?

Thanks

pdogs

Linux should be able to mount all three but WinXP would only mount (as in give a drive letter to) the ntfs partitions.

PS
It wouldn't matter to XP whether the space inbetween the two ntfs partitions was reiserfs or hidden fat/ntfs or unallocated space or etc.

PhantomBeaker

pdogs wrote:

PS
It wouldn't matter to XP whether the space inbetween the two ntfs partitions was reiserfs or hidden fat/ntfs or unallocated space or etc.

Excellent! That's exactly what I was wondering aboot

Thanks!