Date: Sun, 12 May 1996 04:05:01 +0200 (SAT) From: Robert Nordier <rnordier@iafrica.com> To: bob@luke.pmr.com (Bob Willcox) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Help! I need to shrink a DOS partition. Message-ID: <199605120205.EAA05789@eac.iafrica.com> In-Reply-To: <199605120025.TAA13356@luke.pmr.com> from "Bob Willcox" at May 11, 96 07:25:19 pm
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Bob Willcox wrote: > > My notebook's harddrive is one big DOS partion with very little > used in it. I would like to shrink it down so that I can install > FreeBSD, and would like to do it so that I don't have to reinstall > DOS and Windows :-) Seems I remember that there is a way to do > this but my memory (and search) fail me. Can someone give me a > pointer (a program name would be fine). The name you are looking for is FIPS. (There are other programs, but most people use this one.) The latest version is 1.5 and you can find it on a SimTel mirror site (such as ftp.cdrom.com) as follows: msdos/diskutil/fips15.zip You should really approach FIPS with caution, however, as it relies on a sort of trick to do its magic. Having been FIPS-ed, your DOS partition is much more vulnerable to damage, because your DOS filesystem parameters are no longer standard. If MS-DOS one day decides it can no longer trust your partition boot sector (whether through the action of a virus, or corruption from another cause), it will resort to using default filesystem parameters. This may well cause all your DOS files to become quite unreadable, and could mess up data on your entire hard drive. If you really would rather be safe than sorry, a process such as the following is recommended: Use FIPS to split DOS partition C: DOS format the newly-created partition as D: Zip the entire contents of C: to D: Re-fdisk and re-format C: Unzip D: to C: You should also be aware that the FreeBSD msdosfs code has problems with some DOS partitions; and you are more likely to experience problems if your DOS partition has been shrunk by FIPS. In summary: proceed with caution. [Note to the Powers That Be: All this probably needs to be FAQ-ed, if it isn't there already.] -- Robert Nordier
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