Some senseless babbling from Andy Roberts to All
on 10-25-99  08:50 about M$ "screw you" FAT32...

 AR> All ,

 AR> I need to find out how to permanently get rid of a type "b" FAT32
 AR> partition created with WIN95 OSR2.  I assume that is similar to a type
 AR> "F" partition. 
[snip]
 AR> At this point I'll do almost anything to solve this problem and stop
 AR> this annoying repetitive complaining about OS/2 installation not
 AR> flushing the M$ toilet.

 AR> I would appreciate any suggestions in detail that I can forward to him
 AR> to do. 

I haven't had any first-hand experience with a FAT32 partition, so I'm
speculating a bit, as to whether what I say will work or not.

The primary partition table is in the master boot record, which is the
first sector on the drive.  Since it's very unlikely that this FAT32
partition is a logical drive (given the nature of Windows and its users),
that's probably where the partition will be defined.

The partition table is 64 bytes, beginning with offset 446 (with 0 being
the first byte).  Those 64 bytes are four partition entries that are 16
bytes each.  The fifth byte of each entry is the partition type.  Changing
this byte to a value of 0x07 will make OS/2 think it's an HPFS partition
(though it'll be completely broken, of course, as an HPFS partition).  That
should make it comfortable enough to delete the entry.

If it doesn't, then you can zero out all 16 bytes to erase the partition
manually.

Needless to say, this requires a sector editor.  If you have any
programming experience, it can be accomplished with a couple DosDevIOCtl()
calls (one to read the sector, one to write the modified data back),
instead.

Mike Ruskai
thannymeister@yahoo.com


... Be careful what you ask for. You never know who's lurking.

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