Hi, I'm experiencing weird things in windows 2000. I replaced my harddisk with a seagate 40GB harddisk that I took from another computer. I used the seagate maintainance utillity to install the harddisk (wrote zero's, partitionned and formatted wit fat32). I made a 6GB partition for windows (primary1),a data-partition (primary2) and a 3rd partition wich was meant for linux. I installed win2000, then Gentoo Linux. I used fdisk for linux to split the 3rd (logical) partition in 3 partitons (/boot,swap and / for the linux-users between you). When I booted windows again, It could see the 3 drives. when I click on them, windows says they are not formatted and proposes to format them. I didn't really bother, but all of a sudden, windows thinks it can read the linux swap-partition. It ran a scandisk on boot, which generated lots of 'truncated files' and som 'recovered files'. When I logged in, windows had formatted the swappartition in a fat16 partition and had placed all the recovered files on it. I opened one of these files in a texteditor. It was all rubbish, but there was a typical linux path in it, so it managed to read some of it I guess. Each time I boot into linux, I have to convert the partition back to a swap partition, but when I boot into windows again, it can still read the partition... I searched this forum and google, but found nobody that had experienced the same problem. I used powerquest volume manager to see if it gives an error (it always complains if there is an error in the partition table) but that didn't report any problems. any ideas? Johan

I believe your problem has to do with the way that Windows and Linux define partitions. You may have overlapping partitions.

Do you know a tool that can check this and/or corect this problem (if this is the problem)? Johan

The best way to install Linux (if your vesion has built-in formatting) is to just create an unformatted logical partition and let Linux identify it during install. If you have overlapping partitions, it's going to be difficult to sepearte them.

I personally don't know much about this issue except what I have read here. Do a search for the problem. I think the solution was to use partitioning software to change the prtitions sizes, leaving a slight gap between, but not sure.

zorki1c, I created a logical partition, which I deleted during the install of linux. then I used the free space to create 3 logical partitions to isntall linux. A weird thing that I just noticed while checking the partitions with powerquest volumemanager, is that it says that the type of the partition is 'linux swap, but windows sees it as a fat-partition Here's a screenshot of the problem (opens in new windows) drive E,F and G are the linux partitions, F is the problematic partition. None of the 3 partitions should be visible in windows I'll use ranish partition manager to check for gaps between the partitions, but I don't think that's the problem. If there would be overlapping partitions, volume manager would probably complain about it. still no clue what's going on...