Newbish question :

[David Glen Jacobowitz]

I already posted most of this question, but I think my !#@#!
newsreader somehow chopped off the end.
It went a little like this:

I have a big HD disk partitioned as all DOS. It's mostly
empty. I want to repartition it with a 100meg Linux partition. Do I
ahve to zap what dos stuff I have on it or can I "shrink" the DOS part
somwhow?

please help,

dave g jacobowitz
dg...@virginia.edu

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[L.G. Ted Stern]

I had this same problem. It turned out that the SAFEST thing to do was to
back up my DOS partition completely, NO MATTER WHAT FDISK TYPE OPTION I
CHOSE! which in my case meant backups to 3.5"/9mm diskettes. What a pain!
I ended up backing up using standard MS-DOS backup and then repartitioning.

Since then I discovered a DOS program that will backup with compression
to multiple diskettes. In your case, that would reduce the agony from about
40 diskettes to about 20 diskettes. The program is called ARJ, it is available
on your favorite SIMTEL20 mirror site ( I recommend
ftp.uu.net:/systems/simtel20/msdos/arc-lbr/arj230.exe
). The documentation/options are complex, but it comes with .BAT files called
ARJBACK.BAT and ARJREST.BAT, that, with possibly some slight modification,
you can use for your complete backups. I recommend it highly, as it seems to
be extremely well tested and reliable. I would also recommend the option
of a complete reformat of each diskette before you do the backup, something
on the line of FORMAT A: /V:BACKUPS /U [ Note the /U option ... it's
faster, but it's unconditional! No recovery of data!] Nothing is worse than
doing a complete backup, destroying all the data on your disk with FDISK,
and then discovering that a bad diskette has ruined your restore procedure!

Good Luck!
--
==========================================================================
L.G. 'Ted' Stern --- Mostly a Grad Student Peon . . .
st...@amath.washington.edu
lst...@orville.nas.nasa.gov