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On Thu, 02 Oct 1997 14:16:11 -0700, Randal Whittle wrote: >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. > Doesn't Partition Magic also convert to HPFS, depending on the version? HPFS seems to be a good choice because of TRUE long file names and a 512 byte cluster size. Paul