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Randal Whittle wrote: > > 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. Not only that, but it allows you to split a disk into partitions without data loss. This is particularly helpful on FAT16 systems because you can split a drive into smaller partitions and gain efficiency (space) by making each partition small enough so the cluster size can be reduced (example: A drive that's 1 to 2GB in size requires a 32KB cluster size. Partitioning it down below 1GB, say to 900MB, shrinks the required cluster size down to 16KB. That's what I originally did (via fdisk) to squeeze a bit more use out of my 1.2GB ThinkPad disk, I broke it down into 950MB and ~250MB partitions. I went a step further and compressed the 250MB and used it mainly for file archiving). Partition Magic also does the reclustering for you on the newly-sized partition (it doesn't happen automatically). So, even without OS support of FAT32, you can tweak your drive partitions to gain some room (frankly, I was always struggling for space; 1.2GB ain't much these days). > 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). Yep, not having to go through the fdisk hassles was certainly worth the price of PM (I'm gonna start calling it "PM," writing out the full name isn't any more fun ;) [Earlier, I had written]: > >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. While I've read, and understand that there could be a performance ding, I haven't noticed it on the Thinkpad (I use standard PC apps, Word and such, along with graphics editors and some compilers). I'll bet you're doing more disk-intensive work, is that so? Also, I don't think laptop disk space is very cheap yet. Like I said, I was always bumping up against the 1.2GB constraints, so I recently bought a 2.1GB drive (Procom). It cost me almost $600 -- waaaay out of range for a comparable 3.5" disktop disk. I wanted to get their 3.0GB drive, but it was over $800 and I was afraid my boss would club me when I handed him the bill. So, given that laptop HD's are still relatively spendy, I opted to go the FAT32 way on this new drive and did the same partitioning into one large and one small/compressed drive. For the time-being, I'm okay with disk space (but, that won't last long. . .) Dean Cashen