Q Having bought my wife an MP3 player for her birthday, I'd hoped to be able to rip all the stuff under Linux so she could pick and choose what she wants to upload. Unfortunately, it would appear that my setup seems to have decided that the partition that my /root, /home and /mp3 partitions (extended) is formatted as a 'Linux extended' partition, so the XP install can't or won't see it. The hard drive is set up like this:
hda1 XP(primary) hda2 /boot(primary) hda3 /swap(primary) hda4 extended (apparently 'Linux extended') into: hda5 /root (logical) hda6 /user (logical) hda7 /mp3 (logical)
I thought that what I'd do is to change the format of the extended hda4 from Linux extended to some sort of extended Windows filesystem (FAT32, maybe). But that, it seems, would just screw up all the logical Linux partitions. So my current thinking is to dump everything after the XP/hda1 partition and start from scratch. Which would be something like:
hda1 XP (primary) hda2 mp3 (primary, but formattedas FAT32) hda3 extended into: hda5 /boot (logical) hda6 /swap (logical) hda7 /root (logical) hda8 /user (logical)
That would leave a primary hda4 for anything else. I'm presuming that it would be easier if the third primary extended drive should be formatted as some sort of Windows format, but I could still use ext3 for the /boot and /swap directories, and reiserfs for the /root and /user. Do you have a better suggestion?
A There is no such thing as a 'Linux extended' partition type, but you will need to change your MP3 filesystem to FAT32 and modify the partition type so that Windows will pick it up. There are several utilities for Windows that allow you to read ext3 filesystems, but it's simpler to allow mp3s to be FAT32 and have Windows pick it up automatically. The extended partition isn't actually formatted - it's just a place for the system to plonk additional logical partitions due to the old limitation of four partitions per drive. You can organise partitions within an extended partition however you want, although you will need to use /usr rather than /user. Your swap partition isn't actually a mount under /swap, just a partition with its type set to 'Linux Swap'.