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

[Jeff Vian <jvian10@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nate Bargmann wrote:
> 
> * 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).
> 

May be personal preference, but I don't like cfdisk.  Also, it is not
installed by default in the later (RH 7.1 and 7.2) releases of RH.

> 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

You need to check the history of microcoft regarding licensing.  They
were sued for using speed disk without licensing and lost in the court
battle.

> 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).

Microcofts defrag used in win 98 has the option to compress the data.
The moving of hidden files does not occur, so watch the detail window
for defrag to see if any of those reside beyond the end of the main part
of the data.
After running defrag with the compress option then you can run fips as
mentioned below.
fips is included in the RH distro of Linux under the dosutils directory.

> 
> 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.

Partition Magic is great, but as you said, it is commercial. NOT FREE.
and is designed to run under Windows.  The version I tried will create
partitions and modify empty partitions but cannot be used to resize
existing partitions without loss of all the data on the partition.  This
is partly due to the need to format a changed partition under windows. 
It works under all versions of windows AFAIK.

fips, on the other hand, does not require formatting. It just changes
the end of the partition and leaves the existing formatting alone. 
AFAIK it can only be used to reduce the size of an existing FAT or VFAT
partition.

> 
> - Nate >>
> 
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