Baslinux mailing list

[Matrix Mole <matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> Thanks for instructions on how to defragment Windows during startup.  It
> seems a bit too complicated for me right now, so I tried using Windows
> defrag again and it zips through the DOS drive pretty fast and since I
> hardly ever use Windows it did not find too many changes on the Windows
> drive.  I am told our MSDOS 6.22 defrag simply refuses to work on a Fat32
> partition so we are unlikely to destroy Windows that way.  You must have
> had Win95 in Fat16.

Yeah, I was on FAT16 with win95 (prior to fat32 release), I shoulda
realized that dos defrag wouldn't work on fat32, but didn't think about
that fact. Safety measure there I guess. Anyway, there is a tiny .reg file
buried on the win98 disk that you can look into to see how to setup the
defrag at startup time thing (or is it a .inf file that writes the proper
reg entries, can't remember, too lazy to dig my CD our at the moment).

> The info on how to split linux between partitions while booted with the
> ramdisk version is helpful.  If I ever fill up 500G with linux again (not
> counting packages and source code) I will try it, but by then people will
> probably be giving us lots of 20G drives.

With drives so big now days, it would seem that the only real benefit of
partitioning the files is for protextion or ease of organization.
Protection only if you ever manage to catch a virus that has managed to
been wrote to be useable on the linux OS (which seems to be about .01% of
current virii running around right now).

> You say to use 'partition resizer' to resize linux partitions.  We
> determined that partition magic won't resize linux partitions, and
> partition manager says they are an unknown file type and never to try to
> resize before first defragmenting.  What/where is 'partition resizer'?

Partition resizer can be downloaded from zeleps.com it is a very tight dos
based partition utility program that can work on all formats of
filesystems. Make sure you get the 1.3.4 version though, the earlier
versions couldn't handle non FAT filesystems (NTFS, ext2, etc). If you
can't get the zeleps page to load (I can't load it on my work computer,
but home is fine), then just do a google search for "partition resizer"
(with or without quotes, almost same results for sites that matter).
Version 1.3.4 supposedly can modify the partition tables of hard drives of
up to 2TB in size. The only thing it can't do as far as partition work
goes is creating and deleting partitions. That you have to do using a
partition creation/deletion tool (fdisk, etc).

> Jim (my patient fellow-conspirator in trying to build 6 linux computers)
> thanks you for all the information and loves to try out new programs like
> this and hopes that I will have gotten hold of it by the time he finishes
> his C++ programming final this afternoon and attempts to fix a dying
> monitor and some dead speakers which we gave to someone that we fixed up
> with a Win98 computer.  Her previous model (Win95) spent overnight trying
> to defragment and kept starting over (AIM, Weatherbug, virus checker....)
> until we discovered it would run better in SAFE MODE (without all those
> drivers loaded).  What is loading besides drivers which normally slows
> down defrag when you don't do it during startup?

Windows loads a ton of stuff during system startup aside from whats in the
Startup program group on start menu. Look into the registry, use the same
as I mentioned for starting defrag first, just look a few branches up at
Run and RunServices. Everything listed in there is usually started up
prior to Start Menu (and RunServices is started prior to logon screen
appears IIRC).

> Can anyone recommend a good small CAD program for linux which lets you
> zoom in to view details?  With a way to print the output.

I don't know any off the top of my head, but you can try doing a search on
Freshmeat.net and sourceforge.net to see if anything is available. Both
locations are open source project management sites.


-- 
Matrix Mole
matrixm AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org