Date: 24 Feb 1995 18:05:49 GMT From: lim@telerobotics.jpl.nasa.gov (David Lim) Subject: [SUMMARY] Re: [Q] FreeBSD 2.0R - fdisk is non-destructive? Message-ID: <LIM.95Feb24100549@brian.jpl.nasa.gov> In-Reply-To: krnlhkr@mcs.com's message of Fri, 24 Feb 95 00:37 CST References: <m0rhtej-000kR0C@mailbox.mcs.com>
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The answer is FreeBSD fdisk and DOS fdisk is destructive. If you have an existing DOS slice on a drive that you want to repartition to allocate space for a different OS (e.g. FreeBSD), running DOS fdisk on the partition is destructive. This means you should: - back up your DOS slice - boot off a floppy - run fdisk - delete the slice - create the new slices with the correct sizes - format the DOS slice - restore your data onto the DOS slice - proceed to installing FreeBSD on the 2nd slice I found the section on repartitioning in the Linux Installation-HOWTO document to be helpful. Combining this information with the FreeBSD diskspace.FAQ, gives you a good overview of PC slices. There are programs (fips) that non-destructively repartition your slices. The Linux document refers to the use of fips. I see that fips is now in: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0-RELEASE/tools/dos-tools/fips.exe ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/tools/dos-tools/fips11.zip The fips.exe executable appears to be identical to the one in the fips11.zip archive. I don't believe I have fips on my Walnut Creek FreeBSD 2.0 CD-ROM (Jan 1995). I'll have to double check. Either way, fips still strong recommends that you back up your data before using it. terry@cs.weber.edu tells me there is a program called "parted". I did not attempt to locate this utility. Aside: Backing up your DOS slice - To be safe I backed up my DOS slice in two ways before doing fdisk: - using the MWBACKUP utility in Windows (I have Windows for Workgroups 3.11) to back up the data to a second drive. - using XCOPY (I have MS-DOS 6.22) to backup the data to a second drive. I then searched for all hidden files (since XCOPY does not copy hidden files). I found that the only hidden files that existed where in the root directory. - When I came to restore my data, I first tried the xcopy backup. I was able to boot and run DOS, but Windows hung. It started up showing the banner screen, then hung. - I then re-installed generic Windows and run MWBACKUP and was able to restore all my data. - It is curious that xcopy was not able to restore my data. Thanks to: Alex Bachin <bachin@garant.msu.ru> krnlhkr@mcs.com (Louis J. Giliberto, Jr.) terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Ross.Keele@usask.ca (A. Ross Keele)
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