hey all, i'm using fips to split the windows partition and, acorrding to windows, i have 700mb of free space. but fips only offers 200mb if i'm reading this correctly. as the doc said, i searched in dos for hidden files (typing 'dir c:h/s' and 'dir c:s/s') but nothing came up.

i'm wondering if there is a relationship between cylinders and mb's that i'm not aware of (making 200mb reasonable) or i'm not searching for hidden files correctly. thanks in advance

it may be the position on the disk of the fragment that is farthest into the disk.

free space may be there for windows, but not all at the end of the disk.

blight2c what you need to do, is defragment your hardrive in Windows. What this does is, when you have free space in your hardrive and Windows records something on the hardrive or you delete some files, "holes" of empty space are made in between the date that has not been deleted. So, what defragmenting your hardrive does is to move most of your date and compact everything so that all those "holes" disappear. After your defragment your hardrive, all the date will be at the beginning of the hardrive, so you can feel safe making a partition on what ever free space you have left after the defragmentation. This process takes some time depending on your computer and the size of drive and the amount of data and the time since your last defragmentation, so I suggest you defragment while you are gone to watch a movie, or simple overnight . Have fun!

zLinuxz

thanks for the info guys i ran defrag twice before. after the first, fips informed me that there wasn't a single cylinder avaible, after the second i had around 50 free. so i'll run it again, maybe it's a slow war of attritio?.

now i thought i understood the priciples of defragmenting, but maybe someone can correct me. for what ever reason (?) the computer will save files in seemingly random locations. the defrag will copy, move, then delete these in a more logical fashion, right? so why would defraging repeatedly even be necessary, asuming no new files have been written?

also, is there a common error when running defreg from win95? i turn off everything but systray and explorer, click thorough, and make sure not to even move the mouse until it's done. thanks again for the help

one thing you may be having a problem with is system files. it won't move them on the disk.

the best thing to do is reload windows first on a new partition that is the size you want. but I guess you are trying to avoid doing that.

I had a similar problem with fips. Even after defragging
with the Windows(95) defragger, there were some extraneous
fragments positioned well toward the end of the disk.

Luckily I had the Norton Utilities on the disk and I was
able to run Speedisk where I could select to have all
files moved toward the front of the disk. This freed up
all the disk space I needed. Fips then worked fine.

I have read that Partition Magic may be able to do
something similar, but it is unclear.