Installation Question

James Wilkinson fedora at westexe.demon.co.uk
Fri Dec 2 17:38:28 UTC 2005


Anil Kumar Sharma wrote:
> Linux can work from with in a partition having FAT32, and swap space can as
> well be a file on the same partition.
> Definitely Linux will work from D:\ (fat32).
> But Linux from C:\ (fat32) will depend on the capability of boot loader, you
> have option of grub, lilo and wins multi-boot option among others.

Have you actually tried this with Fedora? Actually putting the root
partition on FAT32? I'm very dubious that it would work.

Are you talking about creating a huge file within the FAT partition, and
creating an ext3 filesystem in the large file, or are you talking about
storing the files directly in the FAT filesystem?

As FAT32 doesn't support hardlinks, user and group ownership, device
nodes, or a bunch of other things Linux expects from it's root
filesystem.

Creating an ext3 filesystem in a single large FAT32 file works (up to
the limits of FAT32 files: I think it's 4GB off-hand), but I don't
believe Fedora supports installing to such a filesystem. I understand
some other distributions do.

Linux can read and write FAT32, no problem -- just not as its main
filesystem.

James.

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