>>Partitions
Let's be careful because I have needs and priorities different
from yours, so it would be easy to get at cross-purposes to
no purpose. No use to disagree for different needs.
I agree on partitions. The fewer the better. If I could
arrange it I would have one on each hard drive. I run
NT as my primary OS, so NTFS is my preferred file system,
both for size and for other features (compression, security).
It is essential for me to be able to boot Win 95/98
(currently 95) as a test bed for developed software and other
purposes.
I'm ignoring boot disk switching in the bios till I have
confidence it will be available on any machine I ever get.
Under this restraint, to boot 95 at all
I need FAT16 or FAT32 for the C partition. FAT32 is
useless to me, as I use 95 only for testing (I'm not
really a gamer<g>), and besides NT can't access it,
so by elimination it's FAT16. That means the C partition
is small. It also means the FAT16 partition must be
the first active partition on the first drive, which
in turn means it will be the partition NT boots from.
The only way I can see around this conclusion is to use
a boot manager. That may be necessary, but unless there's
no other way, I will not use one because:
(1) I don't want to depend upon another layer of software for
fundamental operations.
(2) There are support issues. PM needed a patch for
>8.4 gig partitions, didn't it? What about the boot manager.
What's the support for OS2 boot manager?
(3) There are licensing issues. I run 4 machines which
are candidates, and at the moment have 1 PM license and 0
OS2 boot manager licenses. I have not researched the
license situation, though.
Unless the FAT16 C partition is also the NT system partition,
this necessitates dealing with at least two partitions
for an image.
This is enough analysis for one message, but it doesn't address
anything but the C partition! I've spent some bit of time
(at odd hours) on this lately, so it's good to get some of
it out for discussion with others. My wife isn't into
partitions <g>. One of the genuine problems of working
at home.
Yeah, I have the cash for another drive, somewhere ... <g>.
I also have 1 to 5 gig drives on my (physical) desktop, on
my bookshelves, and expect to find 'em in my bed any night now.
I'm looking for an effective way to get RID of these things,
not get more ...
Yes, temporarily I could do what you say. Inevitably, I
will end up with four hard drives as big as I can get,
so I intend to plan for that from the beginning.
Well, I'm going to stop, but this will take more work. |
