Safety for mounting FAT32

[PatG]

I have WinXP and MDK 8.2 on a dual boot system. I was sharing a 25 GB FAT32 partition on my second drive to swap data files and downloads between the two OSes. Last night I rebooted to the Win side and could not access the partition. XP disk management said it was RAW formatted and not FAT32 how I left it. Rebooted to MDK and the mount failed on startup. I am mounting this partition with the following in fstab

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/win_d vfat iocharset=iso8859-1,umask=0,codepage=850 0 0

I have saved files to the partition in my Linux session from StarOffice5.2, Netscape and FTP downloads.

Any ideas what could have corrupted the partition? Is it dangerous to share a FAT32 drive as RW from Linux? :confused:

[Eclipse]

I have been sharing FAT32 drives with linux since 95 OSR2 first came out, and have never had a problem reading or writing to FAT32 from linux. I am currently triple booting Win2K Pro, Win98 SE and SuSE 7.3 using LoadLin. I share a Fat32 common drive between all 3 of the operating systems with no problems.

[PatG]

I am very happy for you. :rolleyes:

What relevance does your reply have to my FAT32 problems?

[mdwatts]

You did ask if it was dangerous to share a fat32 between Windows and Linux and Eclipse gave you their own experiences.

If you cannot access the fat32 partition with either os, perhaps trying some of the freeware partition tools may help to salvage your files.

freshmeat.net will have links to Ranish Parted and other partition/rescue tools.