Repartitioning MS/Windows
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Your computer perhaps came with MS/Windows installed and perhaps two
partitions on the hard drive, one called the C: drive and the other
called the D: drive. These are simply areas on the disk that have
been allocated to each of these ``drives.'' The partition essentially
marks where on the disk the boundaries are between the different
drives. The raw bits associated with each drive are then organised in
some way to create a filesystem. The C: drive and the D: drive
probably have the FAT or the FAT32 filesystem. (Under GNU/Linux these
drives are usually identified as /dev/hda1 and
/dev/hda2.)
These two partitions (or however many your computer came
with--perhaps just one) will probably have been arranged to fill the
whole of the hard drive, leaving no room for any other operating
system. So, if you wish to keep a dual boot system you need to move
these partitions to make room for other partitions (with different
organisations of the bits--that is, different types of file systems).
Changing the size of an existing partition can damage the data on that
partition although by carefully following certain steps this should
not happen. Nonetheless be sure to make a backup of the current
partitions if you can. This is important if you have data on the
system you do not want to lose.
The first step is to decide how much space you need for each of your
partitions. For a 6GB hard drive you might give 3GB to Win32 and 3GB
to GNU/Linux. But this depends on how much space you are currently
using.
Next, the aim is to move all of the data on the current partitions to
the beginning of the partition, then change the location of the end of
the partition. The Win32 tool fips is commonly used to
perform this rearrangement of partitions.
The fips toolkit consists of three files: two executables
(RESTORRB.EXE and FIPS.EXE) and a text file (ERRORS.TXT). These
should be copied to a bootable floppy (created under Win32 with the
DOS command sys a:).
Now under Win32 run your disk de-fragmenter (the DOS command
defrag). When finished reboot your computer, booting from
the fips floppy disk. Then simply type
a:fips and fips will let you know what to do
next.
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