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At 11:05 AM 10/2/97 -0600, Dean Cashen wrote: >> Have you looked at Partition Magic? I've never used it, but >> I hear it can reclaim space back from oversized clusters. > >I've used Partion Magic and I highly recommend it. It's stunning >how easy it makes repartioning your drive, and it provides cluster >optimization to reclaim space. However, it, in and of itself, >won't provide support for FAT32 -- you still need Win95 OSR2 >(or Win98) to reap the benefits of FAT32. Partion Magic detects >if your OS supports FAT32 and if you don't have FAT32 OS support, >Partion Magic won't let you convert the disk to FAT32. However, >even without FAT32 support, Partition Magic still works wonders >to let you partion your drive "on the fly," and allows you to >break your disk into smaller partitions that allow reduced cluster >sizes; even without FAT32 you can save a LOT of space by re- >partioning. The key feature here, as far as Partition Magic goes, is that it lets you effortlessly "convert" (assuming you have the OS support for it) from FAT16 to FAT32 and back. The only other way I know of to do that is through FDISK--which ain't pretty, given that it destroys you data. In this sense, Partition Magic is quite the godsend (among its many other non-destructive partitioning capabilities). >In my case, I updated my 760CD to Win95 OSR2 and used >Partition Magic to convert my FAT drive to FAT32, and then used >it to resize my clusters to (I think) 4K from 32K. On my 1.2GB >drive, this process recovered 213MB of space. Groovey. . . ! I've had really mixed reaction to this FAT32 stuff. At first, I thought it was great, but I really notice the performance hit it creates. Every machine I've put it on, I have also ended up changing it back to FAT16 sooner or later. I figure the disk space is cheap, so I haven't the need to get chintzy with it. ------- Randal J. Whittle whittle@usc.edu (213) 740-7775 Director, Electronic Commerce Program Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California