I have a dual-boot XP/Linux machine, and I had an empty FAT32
partition on it. After converting it to Linux type, ext2, using mkfs
command (I needed extra space for my Linux files), XP is like 1000
times slower than it was before. When XP boots, it says that that
drive is still FAT32, but unrecognized, and the bastard wants to check
it. I think it's slow because of this partition. What should I do
about this? Is there any way to tell XP to forget about this
partition, and how could it say that it's FAT32 and where?

sb wrote:
You could mark it hidden.

--
Ryan Reich
ryanr@uchicago.edu

sb wrote:

What distro? I have had many dual boot boxen in the past (and have a
laptop now) with similar setups, but usually the best way is to *not*
have a Linux partition on the same drive as XP. Ideally, you would put
XP on its own drive and have a FAT32 data partition (so both os's can
read and write to it) on its own drive or on its own partition on a
second drive, sharing the second drive with the Linux partition(s).
This works well. If you have the formerly FAT32 partition on the same
drive as the XP installation, I would suggest you format it back to
FAT32 and use it to share data between the two systems as outlined
above. Another possibility would be to use a third-party boot manager,
like BootItNG and hide the Ext2 (formerly FAT32) partition from
Windows. It isn't hidden now, and that's what is confusing XP.

HTH,

Malke
--
MS MVP - Windows Shell/User
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"

Ryan Reich wrote:

Boot linux. Run cfdisk. Change partition type to 83(linux), write, exit. No
files were harmed in the making of this change.

Well I suppose you could, but if it doesn't hide the partition from the XP
partitioning tool, I can't see the benefit.

Styvaen.