🚀 go-pugleaf

stg121@vuv2.anu.edu.au (Stephen T. Gibson) writes:

> I am planning to partition a 2.5GB HD using FIPS. My system is a 
> Pentium 166, running Windows95(B). 
> I am confused by the following text of the fips.doc file
> 
>   "...But before starting FIPS you _must_ now defragment your Harddisk.
>    All of the space that will be used for the new partition must be free.
<snip>

FIPS is not a good choice IMO.  It _can_ get you a Linux partition if
you absolutely, positively, have no other choice.

As far as I know, FIPS is not able to change the FAT cluster size.
With a 16bit FAT, you would therefore have at most 65536 clusters on a
partition.  If your 2.5G HD is a single partition, your cluster size
would have to be 64K.  The number of clusters available is:
2,500,000 / 64 = 39062.  This is also the max number of files you can
have on that partition.

With FIPS you can allocate the clusters above a certain number to a
new (Linux) partition.  Those clusters must be unused - hence the need
to de-frag first.

The max-cluster number of the original FAT partition is changed to
reflect the reduced partition size and to prevent DOS from writing
into the new partition.  Assuming you give half of your original
partition to Linux, you would be left with 19531 clusters.  E.g. 19531
files with one byte each would fill up your partition.

You would be far better off partitioning your HD such that your FAT
partitions do not exceed 500MB (8KB clusters) or maybe 1GB (16KB
clusters).  For Linux, you should allow at least one ordinary ext2
partition and a swap partion of, say 32MB.  The Ext2 file system does
not suffer the FAT-FS limitations.

-- 
Manfred Bartz <mbartz@werple.net.au>
  --- LINUX, live free or die ---