[linux-help] Re: Best way to have Linux automatically mount a volume on bootup

[Nate Bargmann <n0nb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Tom Hull <thull@xxxxxxxxxxx> [2002 Mar 16 22:10 -0600]:
> 
> If you need to create a new partition on the disk, you can use fdsk, but
> I can't try to explain that here. If you wish to defragment your FAT
> partition, then reduce its size and create a new partition with the
> unused space, there's a way to do that too, but I've never done it,
> and offhand don't recall what the program is.

If you have it on your system, cfdisk is a bit more user friendly than
plain fdisk (this is on Linux).  I also found cfdisk to be more capable
with large hard drive and more than 8 partitions on a disk (3 primary,
an extended and then more than for logical partitions in the extended
partition).

Norton Speed Disk was the favorite for defragging FAT systems and you
could move everything to the front of the partition by selecting the
correct option (it's not the default behavior).  MS licensed Speed Disk
and MS-DOS 6.0 through 6.22 included it as DEFRAG.EXE.  Now whether that
will work on later versions of DOS in Win9x, is a good question.  One
thing to note is that Speed Disk will not move hidden files such as a
permanent Windows swap file.  So if your Windows setup is using a
permanent swap file, you'll want to change that to a temporary file
created each type Windows starts (this may no longer be an option in
Win95 or later).

To resize a partition there is a free utility called fips
http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/  I used it once to resize a FAT 
based OS/2 partition and it worked well.  There is a commercial product 
out there called Partition Magic, which I thought Red Hat includes, 
that can manipulate quite a number of filesystem types.

- Nate >>

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