LinuxQuestions.org - UMSDOS question

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WARNING: :newbie: question

What filesystems does UMSDOS work with? For instance I know it works with FAT but does it work with FAT32 or NTFS? I have a 120GB HDD that is using NTFS (Windows XP Pro) and I'm wondering if I can install Slackware 9.1 using this feature as I'm not really in favor of repartitioning if I can avoid it.

NOTE: I'd like to use LILO with this setup.

I don't think it'll work with NTFS because this is fundamentally different to the FAT filesystems. It should work fine with FAT32 though.

If you want something that will work from within an NTFS system then you will want something that creates a huge file on the NTFS system and formats that file as ext2.

Quote:

ZipSlack is a special edition of Slackware Linux that can be installed onto any FAT (or FAT32) filesystem with about 100 MB of free space. It uses the UMSDOS filesystem and contains most of the programs you will need. This means that you do not need to repartition your hard disk if you already have DOS or Windows installed. ZipSlack installs into a directory on your DOS filesystem. It can also be installed to and booted from a Zip disk.

The hardware required to run ZipSlack does not differ that much from the full Slackware Linux distribution. Below is the minimum hardware you need in order to run ZipSlack.

386 processor
16 megabytes of RAM
100 megabytes of hard disk space on a FAT or FAT32 filesystem

Sorry but it will not work with NTFS.

Take a look at topilogi linux. It's Slackware based, and uses a loopback file on an ntfs partition.