🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <831057378.5537.0@nook.demon.co.uk>
           neil@nook.demon.co.uk "Neil Trotter" writes:

| jim@jfitz.demon.co.uk (Jim Fitzpatrick) said:
|
| >A friend of mine has just had his faulty hard drive changed under
| >warranty. The original was 850Mb and contained 600Mb of data, which he
| >backed-up onto tape. The new one is 1Gb.
|
| >With the 600Mb of data restored, the 1Gb disk reports 150Mb free -
| >i.e. apparently 850 Mb used by only 600Mb of data. The only difference
| >between the setups is that his 850Mb disk had Win3.11 installed,
| >whereas during the upheaval he took the opportunity to change to Win95
| >with the 1Gb disk.
|
| >Any idea what may be going on here? He's checked for temporary files,
| >swapfile size...i.e. all of the obvious things. I don't know the size
| >of his clusters (oo-err! fnarr, fnarr!) but you'd need a hell of a lot
| >of small files to spirit 250Mb away like that. Win95 will be taking up
| >more room than Win3.11, and of course 1Gb is the unformatted capacity,
| >but both of these things together should account for a few tens of
| >megabytes, not hundreds.
|
| Jim,
|
| You hinted at the most likely cause, reluctant though you are to believe it.
| If the 1GB drive is configured with a single partition, then the size of his
| clusters (aka ALUs or Allocation Units) are 16K (16,284 bytes).
|
| The only method I know to minimize this "slack space" wastage is to
| partition the hard drive into smaller logical drives.  (This may not be all
| that inconvenient for your friend, as it sounds as though he has a fairly
| adequate tape backup unit).

   The other method (I'm not advocating it, just mentioning it for the
   sake of completeness) is a compressed drive, like DRVSPACE.  This
   eliminates all the slack wasted in at the end of clusters. I seem to
   to remember there is some size limitation so you would still need more
   than one partition - though you would get more in it:-)

|
| I *do* know another way, but that involves moving to an entirely different
| File System (i.e. another OS).
|
| Here's the low-down on what your clusters will be for ranges of
| partition-size:
|
|         Partition size          ALU size in bytes
|
|         64MB-128MB              2,048
|         128MB-256MB             4,096
|         256MB-512MB             8,192
|         512MB-1GB               16,384
|         1GB-2GB                 32,768
|
| ... and so forth -- get the pattern?
|
| This is a feature of the FAT file system.  Personally, I stick to partitions
| of 254MB, just to be on the safe side.
|
    Agreed, so do I. I reccommend the original poster get a copy of

    ftp://ftp.demon.co.uk/simtel(net)/msdos/fileut(i)l/wastedxx.zip

    This program will tell him _exactly_ what is happening on his
    machine and spell out the effects of changing partition with
    _his_ data.   An excellent little utility.

--
Peter Hayward, Cambridge, UK.      | In a democracy the public will only
peter@cdsl.demon.co.uk             | respect laws if they respect the
tel +44-1223-312-923               | politicians that make them.