Hello,

I'd like to report a problem I recently encountered with the
RedHat 5.1
distribution on Intel.

I'd like to know if anyone else has ever experienced the
problem, and if
it can be fixed in any way.

I recently installed Linux on a rather small (ext2 fs)
partition for a
Unix tutorial/demo purposes at work.

There were no place for a swap partition, but my fat/fat32
drives had
plenty of space left on them, so I figured I'd use a swap
file on one of
these drive.

There was a fat32 drive available as /mnt/c and a fat on
available as
/mnt/f.  (I believe both of them were mounted as vfat rather
than
msdos).

I first tried on the /mnt/f partition.  I created a file
(might not have
done it correctly using dd first.), then mkswap on it, and
finally,
swapon on it.

Things appeared correct, until I started getting errors
regarding the
swapfile.

At this point, things started getting bad.  I couldn't
access the fat
partition at all.  I didn't try to find the exact cause of
the problem,
and redid the same thing on the fat32 partition (probably
creating the
swapfile correctly from the start then).

Same problem happened.  After the system tried to use the
file (I
guess), the whole fat32 partition was unreadeable.

Worst, I couldn't even boot from the fat32 partition.  If
I'd boot from
a diskette, the fat32 partition was accessible fine.  I had
less chance
with the fat partition, as I've not been able to read
anything from it
since then.  From Linux, none of these partitions are now
mountable.

Closer look at the information on the disk revealed that the
boot
sectors of the partitions appeared to have been totally
blanked.

Any help in recovering the data/restoring the drive would be
greatly
appreciated!

Thanks!

Martin