[ale] 'fips' usage question

[Gary Maltzen]

Full product Partition Magic 3.0 (and, by inference, 4.0) should handle this
fine. I assume you are aware of the potential pitfalls: (1) expanding the
extended partition (hda2?) will give you free space at the front and
creating a new partition here will change the drive designations
(hda5->hda6, etc.); (2) moving the boot partition (hda5?) will invalidate
the LILO loader tables.

Least impact would seem to be in creating a new primary partition using PM
as it will relocate the extended partition to hda3 and create the new
primary partition in hda2; this would leave hda5-6-7 intact.  Using Linux'
fdisk would force you to create hda3 as the new primary and some legacy OS'
(Redmond? Boca Raton?) might choke if the MBR partitions aren't in logical
block order.

-----Original Message-----
 From: John Mills <Jmills at TGA.com>


I have just installed RH2.0 (Hedwig) with no problems on the top half of a 4
GBy disk. RH's install did its usual trick of creating an extended partition
containing /, /home, and swap.
I want to shrink the FAT16 DOS/Win95 partition to half its current size and
devote the freed 1 MBY to Linux, but Partition Magic (from the Mandrake
repackaging of RH6.0) declines, since there is already a Linux partition.

'fips' docs also caution that it should not be used on a system with more
than one installed OS. I had hoped repartition, reboot Linux from a boot
diskette, then rerun 'lilo' to rebuild my boot sector. Does anyone know a
[reasonably] safe way to shrink my DOS partition and keep both my Linux
installation and the content of my Win95 installation?