[NTLUG:Discuss] mounting a former ntfs drive

[Bishop, Cass]

I found a work around to a problem I'm having but I am not totally clear on
why it works.

I was trying to mount a drive that used to be a ntfs.  I ran fdisk and
create a new partition table with 2 Linux partitions.  I ran mkfs.ext3 on
both of the partitions and tried to mount them.  The second partition
mounted fine but the first would not an said that the drive was ntfs and
since I did not have kernel support for it I could not mount it.  After a
quick redo to see if I had missed anything I started messing around with
fdisk and I used command b, move beginning of data in a partition.  I moved
the beginning of the data from 32 to 50, ran mkfs.ext3 and the drive now
mounts fine.  The problem is I'm not exactly sure what the b command did or
why it works.  Can anyone shed a little light on my problem?

Cass Bishop