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WINE and FAT32 Problems—Day 51© Copyright Darrell Anderson. I’m getting closer to solving some of the mysteries of WINE. This is a slow process. Although somebody within that community at one time took a lot of time and sincere effort to write some documentation, the effort is out of date and not helpful. For example, the .wine/config file is depracated and now no longer in use or needed. Everything is contained in the fake registry files. I have been able to get Word to function on my test box, but that box does not have any Windows software installed in other partitions. I also had to perform a raw installation of Word. In my primary box, Word is already installed in my D: drive and I want to use those files. Additionally, I want WINE to import my Word registry configuration into the WINE fake registry. I want my Word environment in bothoperating systems to look and function the same. There is more to this story and rest assured that once I manage to conquer WINE I will provide a detailed explanation of my trials and tribulations. Speaking of my test box, I had an accident. I was trying to discern how small of a FAT 32 partition I could create. In my primary box I now have a 2 GB FAT32 partition to serve both my Windows and Slackware systems. Eventually I will convert my entire E: data partition to FAT32. However, NT4 does not natively support FAT32. Although I use a freely available FAT32 driver, that driver provides no tools to maintain a FAT32 partitition. Thus, I need to maintain the nominal files necessary to perform a Scandisk of my FAT32 partition. That nominal FAT32 support requires less than 2 MB of disk storage. Thus, I wanted to shrink that partition as much as possible because once I converted my E: partition to FAT32, I’d have plenty of data file storage for both NT4 and Slackware. I only needed that sliver of a partition so I could manually run Scandisk. I experimented on my test box. I used the Mandrake 10.1 DiskDrake to add a FAT32 partition. I updated the partition table. Unlike my previous experiences with version 9.2 of DiskDrake, I did not stop to check if my partition table was okey. I then ventured into playing with cfdisk as well as a proprietary partition tool. I don’t recall changing anthing but when I rebooted I received a kernel panic. Hmm. All of my partitions were gone expect the /boot partition. All other partitions, which were logical partitions in the extended partiton, were gone. I did not panic. I was certain I had not perfomed any write operations. I should be able to recover my partitions with my proprietary program. I let it loose and was toldl that 10 partitions were recovered. The only problem is that the partitions “recovered” were remnants of an old Ghost session when I had created an image of my primary system. I then tried gpart. This is a pretty cool program. I ran the program in interactive mode and that seemed to help me find correct partitions. Or so I thought. The damage was too complete. I was disappointed because the test box helps me try things without damaging my primary box. I am not saying that the Mandrake 10.1 DiskDrake utility was the sole cause, but based upon my 9.2 experiences I admit that I am suspicious. I doubt I’ll ever again use DiskDrake for partitioning. I will use this mess as a learning opportunity. Additionally, starting over will help me improve my skills at installing Slackware from scratch. By now I have a good idea of what programs I want to install on any box, and as the old adage goes, practice makes perfect. No, I have no backups—this was a test box. However, next time I will backup some critical files, especially my /etc directory because my test box uses an AGP video card. Thus, although I can recreate most of my installation by copying files from my primary box, I still willhave to manually configure the video. However, my memory is fresh and I think I do all of this with only a modicum of kicking, shouting, and screaming! Finis. |
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