[Tfug] Partition Second Drive

[Bexley Hall]

Hi, Don,

--- Don Freeman <DFreeman at pagnet.org> wrote:

> I used PM when I first tried to set up a Linux
> system alongside windows. It corrupted my whole
> drive and I ended up having to FDISK and reformat
> the whole thing. So, make sure you have a good
> backup before you start. 

PM's user interface sucks!  They need to have some
sort of "wizard" that makes sure you do all the
right things in just the right order!

I did a fair bit of googling before I tried it
on my machine.  I had had a bad experience with
FIPS when trying to squeeze a FreeBSD partition
onto a drive some years ago.  I wasn't eager to
screw myself *again*!  :<

I think the big problem is when you try to shrink
a partition.  I'm unsure as to what all of the
right magic is for that scenario -- defragment
drive?  make sure no "hidden" files (which are
immobile) reside in the part of the disk that
is being shrunk, etc.

In my case, I had a 2G FAT16 that I converted to
FAT32 using MS's FAT32 converter.  Then, used
PM to expand that FAT32 to an 8G partition (I would
have wanted 8.4G but apparently my PM version has
an 8G limit).  This worked perfectly for me -- but
it was painfully slow!

Backup is one of those things that you *really*
want to have available unless you don't care about
the existing data (in my case, it was a virgin
W98 installation so I could recreate it "from
scratch" easier than I could back it up!)

--don


 
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