Fedora 14 shrink sees FAT32 as vfat

[Radioman621]

Not sure if this is due to something Dell has done or not. I have XP installed, and want to do dual boot with Fedora 14. I boot from the live Fedora 14 disk and select install on harddrive.

I get through down to the partitioning section. I select shrink to shrink the W xp partition and get a message telling me that Fedora cannot find a partition to shrink. If select manual Fedora sees a partition it believes to be vfat. A reboot into xp reveals that xp thinks the partition is FAT32. Arrrrrrrrgh! What am I missing here?

I am trying to not format the drive and create a smaller partition for XP, reinstall XP, then tell Fedora to use what is left, as I hate going through the draconian Windows registration crap.

Any ideas what is happening?

[ryptyde]

I believe vfat has something to do with long filenames in Windows. It may be that the LiveCD/USB
doesn't have the proper tools to shrink the Windows partition. I have always used a gparted LiveCD
to shrink the Windows partition and leave the part for Fedora as unallocated freespace. Then I use
the Fedora livecd/usb and install to the unallocated freespace. Hope this make sense but it workd for
me using live installs. I think that the DVD installs have all the tools necessary to shrink and format.

phil

[Radioman621]

Thanks.. I am burning gparted-live to a cd as I type this. I tried to use shrink as there about a dozen websites talking about xp / Fedora dual boot and they all use shrink. There are even a couple of youtube videos of people doing this. so I was surprised when it choked.

Thanks Steve

---------- Post added at 04:23 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:39 PM ----------

downloaded the gparted iso to and burned it to a disk. It successfully shrank the partition. Then edited grub.conf so that it knew about the XP partition.

I am a Ham Radio op, and there are two programs I want to use that are W only, thus the dual boot, as I don't want to dedicate a very nice computer to W only, when 99% of the time I will run some flavor of Linux, or OS-X, or FreeBSD.

So long and thanks for all the fis....er help.

Stephen Hawkins NG0G