[Pc_Support] Windows 2000 and FAT32 -> ext3; Windows goes nuts

[Jason Boxman]

Fun.

I had an FAT32 partition on /dev/hdc2 (This Dell has the CD and HD reversed) 
and recently converted it to an extended partition and installed ext3 
on /dev/hdc5 and installed Debian.

Well, of course, Windows flips out.

I managed to remove a drive letter assignment from it, but Windows 2000 still 
wants to fsck what it still believes is a FAT32 filesystem at boot time.  
I've managed to abort it, but I can't imagine it would be good were I to miss 
that abortion prompt.

Can I just make the partition go away so Windows forgets it exists?  I've not 
had problems in the past when I leave the partition unformatted forever and 
later install Linux.  Windows just claims it's unformatted.  That's fine.  
But in this instance it was formatted prior and I didn't nuke it in Windows 
before changing the partition table out from under Windows.

Perhaps I can just delete the logical 'drive' under Windows' Disk Management 
and then add it back manually via `fdisk` or whatever?  The actual on disk 
layout shouldn't change, I'd think, so it ought to be completely safe?

Thoughts?

Thanks.

-- 

Jason Boxman
http://edseek.com/ - Linux and FOSS stuff