FIPS 1.5 - file SPECIAL.DOC --------------------------- S1. Use with Stacker/SuperStor/Doublespace etc. S2. Use with OS/2 S3. Use with OnTrack Disk Manager and similar drivers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ S1. Use with Stacker/SuperStor/Doublespace etc. These programs are used to increase disk space by compressing files. They all work similarly. When installed, they create a compressed volume on the disk, into which all the files are moved. This compressed volume is a big file that fills up almost all space on the disk. After booting with the compression driver, the previous drive C: that contains the compressed volume is renamed to D:, and the compressed volume itself becomes C:. From reports I received from users of Stacker and DoubleSpace, I distilled the following scheme. If you have difficulties, please let me know. a. Make sure that there is enough space on the compressed partition to be split. b. Use the Checkdisk program that comes with the compression software. c. Remove the Windows swapfile if you have one. d. Decrease the size of the compressed volume with the utilities that come with the compression software. e. Defragment the uncompressed drive that contains the compressed volume (in most cases drive D:) f. use FIPS as described in FIPS.DOC If your system will not let you defragment the uncompressed drive or if the compressed volume can not be defragmented because it has the hidden attribute set, FIPS might not offer as much space for the new partition as is shown in the directory listing of the uncompressed drive. You should add the following steps: e1. Copy the defragmentation program (e.g. diskopt.exe, defrag.exe) of the system to the boot disk e2. Boot without the compression device driver. This may be tricky, since in some systems the driver is part of the system files on the boot disk. Try using a boot disk from an older DOS version, or consult your manuals. e3. Remove Hidden, Readonly and System attributes from compressed volume (use dir /a:h to find the name of the the compressed volume) e4. Defragment the partition. It was reported that you can use FIPS either with or without the compression driver loaded. S2. Use with OS/2 FIPS is known to have problems with OS/2, especially with the dual boot feature. This is partly due to the fact that OS/2 dual boot uses two copies of the boot sector - if only one copy is changed by FIPS, OS/2 will not work properly. But even when taking this into consideration, some people have reported strange error messages by OS/2. I encourage you to give FIPS a try, but make sure to save the root and boot sector to floppy disk with FIPS before making any changes. FIPS might work if you a. Remove dual boot from the partition if you use it. I don't know if and how this is possible, please consult your manual or call IBM. If you find out, please let me know, so that I can include this info. b. Boot from a bootable DOS disk c. Run FIPS (make sure to make FIPS save the root and boot sector to floppy) d. Reboot, check if everything is ok under DOS e. Boot from your OS/2 installation disk and reinstall dual boot if necessary. f. Boot to OS/2 and look if everything works as expected. If e. does not work (OS/2 complains with 'hardware error' or something similar), use RESTORRB to undo the changes FIPS made, reboot again and reinstall dual boot (if necessary). So far I did not find out what OS/2 complains about. Since I do not use OS/2, I have to rely on user reports. If you try FIPS with OS/2, I would like to hear about it. Any information is welcome, even if it is just "it worked" or "it did not work". If you have an idea what might be the problem or any technical information, please tell me about it. S3. Use with OnTrack Disk Manager and similar drivers Note: Everything said here also applies to similar device drivers that perform the same functions as OnTrack. OnTrack is just the most widely used such system. I'll try to start at the beginning: Older BIOSes have a limit on the 'drive geometry' built in, i.e. they can only properly handle disk drives of up to 1024 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors. Given a sector size of 512, this results in a total limit of 504 MB. Most hard drives are far larger nowadays, especially in the number of cylinders. So a method for accessing these large drives had to be devised. For compatibility reasons, the cylinder and sector count could not be extended, but there was still room in the number of heads value - up to 256 heads. Modern BIOSes (i.e. BIOSes prepared for EIDE drives) do exactly this, they trick DOS into thinking that the disk has less than 1024 cylinders, but more than 16 heads (this is indicated by 'extended sector translation' or 'logical block addressing' in the BIOS setup). The same is true for SCSI disks - in this case the translation is done by the BIOS of the SCSI controller. If you have one of these, you will probably not be using OnTrack anyway. OnTrack Disk Manager is a special program that does the translation in software. It installs its own boot program in the hard disk's master boot record, so that it is loaded before any other disk access is done. This means that you can not access the hard disk without loading the OnTrack device driver first. This is also true for FIPS. If you just boot from a floppy disk, you will not be able to access the C: drive, and FIPS will not work. As far as I know, you _must_ boot from the hard disk, after which FIPS will work properly. Note to Linux users: You can NOT use this scheme to create a Linux partition. This is because the partitioning information that FIPS modifies is on a level above the OTDM driver, so you can only access them after having loaded the driver. Since Linux does not use DOS drivers, it can not access the new partition. The only thing that Linux will see is a large non-DOS partition: the OnTrack partition (system indicator byte 54h or 56h). Unfortunately, I currently know of no way to get rid of the OnTrack device driver or to split off a partition for use under Linux without completely reformatting and thus losing all data. It might be possible, given sufficient technical information, but since I personally don't use it, I can't investigate further into this. If you are prepared to reformat the disk (after backing up all your data), you can just delete the OnTrack partition with Linux fdisk and create new partitions as you require. Note that you can create a DOS partition at the beginning of the disk. You won't need OnTrack to use it, as long as its last cylinder is less than 1024. Linux of course has no problems accessing the cylinders beyond 1024, so you can use all the rest of the disk for Linux partitions. In case of problems, read the EIDE- Mini-HOWTO, it contains some more information on this from the Linux point of view.