[plug] Large HD and VMWare's raw partitions

[Subba Rao]

One of my Linux system has a slave disk which is 20GB.

(0)root at myhost:/~# fdisk /dev/hdc

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 2646.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help)

(0)root at myhost:~/

The disk partitions at the begining of the disk are Linux ext2 filesystems.
Four partitions at the end of the disk are FAT16/msdos. The DOS partitions
have been defined in /etc/fstab but at bootup time, these file systems are
not getting mounted. I cannot even mount them manually. When I tried to mount
them,
	mount -t auto /dev/hdc5 /msdos

then the filesystem is mounted as a ext2 filesystems. When I try to mount them
as msdos filesystems,

	mount -t msdos /dev/hdc5 /msdos

then the following message appears:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hdc5,
       or too many mounted file systems

The goal is to create a raw partition for VMWare on the /dev/hdc5 partition and
install NT over it rely on M$ systems.

How can I create raw partitions for VMware on large HDs and mount them? 

Thank you in advance.

Subba Rao
subb3 at attglobal.net
http://pws.prserv.net/truemax/