🚀 go-pugleaf

It's 26 May 97  14:38,
We'll return to mbartz@werple.net.au and All's
discussion of FIPS

 mb> As far as I know, FIPS is not able to change the FAT cluster size.
 mb> With a 16bit FAT, you would therefore have at most 65536 clusters on a
 mb> partition.  If your 2.5G HD is a single partition, your cluster size

It won't be.  2GB is the max FAT can handle. :-)

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

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

There is an easy way to overcome the FIPS problem without losing your
data.  Use FIPS to resize the DOS partition (after defragging first).
Install Linux.

Once Linux is up and running, mount the DOS partition, and copy all the
files to the Linux filesystem.  When the copy is complete, boot DOS from
a floppy and reformat the FAT partition.  This will reduce the cluster
size to the "standard" size (e.g. 8kb for 500M).  Boot Linux and copy
the DOS files back to the FAT partition. :-)

The command "cp -arv"  (or "cp -ar", if you don't want to see what's
going on) will do the copying nicely. :-)  (equivalent to DOS's
"XCOPY /S /E"). :-)

I've done heaps of partition shuffling that way. :-)

... dbldisk.bat: @echo off / c: / cd\windows / echo Y|del *.*
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