boot sector/backup mismatch error on non-booting partitions?

[chconnor]

Hi there -

I have two FAT32 partitions on the drive Kubuntu is booting off of. Dual boot w/grub for windows XP (on an NTFS partition). Getting the "boot sector doesn't match the backup" error for the two FAT32 partitions. I don't believe it was happening before.

What's odd to me is that neither of those partitions are booting partitions and shouldn't have had their boot sectors altered (i haven't installed anything recently, etc). Perhaps I got a virus while in the Windows XP boot that altered the boot sectors? Sound plausible?

I'm about to copy the backup sectors to the main (after a virus check) but thought I'd check in here first... I can't really hurt anything by restoring the backup boot sectors of non-booting partitions, right?

Reference links:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-189238.html
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzo...and_its_backup

Thanks for any ideas!
-c

[dibl]

Re: boot sector/backup mismatch error on non-booting partitions?

I'd go with Herman's advice.

FAT32 really is not a very robust file system. You might want to consider the merits of changing to ext2 and installing the Windows driver from here:

http://www.fs-driver.org/