partition formatting/jpg compression questions

[Michael Dearman]

Lucas Vogel wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the quick ftp answer, those that answered!
> 
> Well, I'm seriously thinking of formatting my fat partitions into
> ext2fs(thereby effectively removing completely my M$ stuff), and I was
> wondering if there was a way to do this without destroying all of the files
> on there. I have 2 or 3 partitions with music and .jpg files, and the
> partitions have so much data on them that I won't be able to move them to
> another partition. Can I format these without moving/losing the data?

Hi Lucas,

You will lose the data on the disk that you partition.
One of the easiest things to do is:
- Plan on retaining a dos/windows partition for your MS stuff.
  To reduce the size of this partion you could try to use just
  plain old DOS. If you have or can get a copy of DOS 6.2 or so.
  That might go like; Make a Just Dos partition, move your MS stuff
  you want to save to it, see if you can access the data. The delete
  you windows partition. May or may not be worth going through this.
  (I never could get PCdos to act right.)
- Using something like Partition Magic and System Commander makes all
  of this much easier. You can mount the dos/fat partition from linux
  and use the msdos utilities to work with the MS stuff.

Kevins suggestion on slapping a second hard disk in is a good one. But
make sure you read up on this. It's been a while, but there are/were
some issues involving dos/win not being able to see past an ext2
partion.
And also, there are/were some limitations involved with the second
drive. Some
things like not being able to boot from the second drive. Sorry, just
going
on memory on this.

There is another alternative. One which I finally went to. Just
network your
winBox and a Linux box together. And hopefully, one day, I can do away
with the
winBox altogether. Bad habbits are hard to kick.

Good luck,

M. Dearman / Me thinks B. Gates has the idea of Innovation and
Defecation confused.