>>lift his sanctions on this weapon of mass deconstruction
Hey, it's your weapon, Kimosabe. Pull the trigger whenever
you're ready to fire ...
The max size of a FAT16 partition is 2 gig. You might
consider using PM to reduce the FAT32 partition on your
D drive to 2 gig or smaller, then convert it to FAT16.
You would then have room on the rest of the drive for
a large NTFS partition or several FAT16 partitions,
or a mixture, as you choose.
Since you already have NT running, and since, I assume,
you could reinstall Win 98 reasonably painlessly (that
is, you haven't loaded a lot of Win 98 applications),
my approach would be just to do it. You're not
risking the primary OS.
Personally, I would give serious consideration to
the following scenario:
Shrink the Fat32 partition down to a smallish FAT16 partition,
which will be the first primary parition on the D
drive. It's already a primary partition because Win 98
can boot from it. I'll explain smallish in a minute.
Now boot Win 98 from the bios, making the FAT16 partition
the C drive, and install a fresh version of NT ONTO THE
FAT16 PARTITION, right along with Win98. During this
process, DO NOT TOUCH THE EXISTING NTFS PARTITION on
the other drive (now relabeled D, I believe, but it
doesn't matter as long as you leave it alone). This
will become your backup NT system for emergency repairs.
If you let it install normally, you will end up with
a dual boot on the FAT16 partition between Win 98
and your backup NT. You will NOT need to do anything
special to achieve this; it will happen by default.
For added safety, I would give the new NT directory a different
name from the existing NT install. On my PC for
example, the NT directory is Winnt and the backup is
Winnt0 (that's a zero), from which you can see I don't
have a lot of imagination<g>.
When this is done, you can check it out at your leisure --
be sure you can boot Win 98 or NT from the FAT16 drive,
look at the boot.ini file in the FAT16 root directory
(it's just a text file), etc, while you plan how to
partition the rest of the drive.
When you're ready to partition the rest of the drive,
I would suggest you reboot the original NT (from the
NTFS drive) and use the NT disk manager to make the
partitions. (I'm assuming you don't want any FAT32
partition -- they would have to be made from Win 98.)
Good to know how to use Disk Manager, and again, you're
not messing with your primary NT partition, so the
penalty for even the worst disaster is relatively small.
If anything goes wrong, no big sweat. The worst that happens
is you recable to make the FAT16 drive the C drive, prudently
disconnecting the NTFS drive, and reinstall Win 98 and NT
from scratch. There's not a lot of pain in installing from
scratch when you haven't set up a lot of apps. Be sure you
have the Win 98 install floppy around before you start, though.
The point is, your original NT install is safe.
Smallish partition. There are two "smallish" FAT16 partition
sizes that make sense - 500 mb and 1000 mb. In a 500mb
partition, the cluster size is 8k; at 1000mb it is 16k,
over that it is 32k. A cluster is the minimum disk space
allocated by the FAT16 file system - every file requires at
least one cluster, even a 1-byte text file. The bigger
the cluster, the more disk space wasted by small files
and the last cluster of larger files. In particular,
the OS installs consist of approximately a googol of
small and tiny files.
A 500mb partition is plenty big for all of my OSs (DOS,
Win3.11, Win95, Winnt) with a couple of hundred mb to spare.
If you want the partition bigger (for DOOM or something), you might
as well go to a 1000mb so far as the cluster size is concerned.
For drive image files or any other large files, the cluster
size doesn't matter much. You can use the rest of the
disk for 2mb FAT16 partitions or whatever you choose.
(I'd use as much NTFS as I could get away with, but that's
me.)
BTW, I did some experimenting once and found that in FDISK
you had to specify 511 mb to get the max 8k cluster partition.
I think, anyhow -- it's been years. Anyway, you want to
stay UNDER 512 (and under 1024 for 16k clusters).
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