On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 11:30:28PM -0400, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote: > Thank you James. OK if there are issues with mkdosfs -F32, then I will > probably need that win98 rescue floppy to preserve the ability to > defrag... But I don't see why I'd want to sys c:? What does it put there > that tar couldn't restore and wasn't going to be overwritten by the > lilo -b /dev/hda? Information in DOS boot sector. And in older DOS, the boot files had to be in specific locations. There are other issues with using tar: 1) dosfs uses a different set of attributes: hidden, archive, system and read-only, and only the read-only bit is exported/used under linux 2) dosfs has two entries for long filenames: the shorter version and the longer version split in several parts. I wouldn't expect problems when software use the long names, but when extracting the files under linux there's no guarantee that the short name will be the same as before. If any software (under windows) uses the short name directly, then you're likely to have problems. For the past years I never tried the tar solution. I always "dd"ed the raw partition (creating beforehand a zeroed file to erase garbage for better compression). I think I had some failed attempts with windows95, that made me never to try again. But it could be that win98 is more resistant to 1) and 2), and make you a happy person. :) Regards, Luciano Rocha
