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You need to have a minimum of 60 megabytes free on your hard drive for a bare-bones Linux installation. A more reasonable estimate is around 250 megabytes, and a complete installation takes up around 600 megabytes. This section takes you through the creation of space on your hard drive by showing you how it would be done on a fictional 1GB hard drive with 1024 cylinders. The drive has 600MB of space free.
| JUST A MINUTE |
When looking at the data on the hard disk drive listed in the BIOS, you should have seen some items like Cylinders, Heads, and Sectors. The only important number here is Cylinders—they are the building blocks of partitions. If you partition half of the fictional hard drive mentioned in the preceding paragraph, you would be setting aside 512 cylinders for use. |
To diagram how you want to layout the OS on the machine, the first step is to write down what's already on the hard drive(s), what cylinders those partitions cover, and what can be moved. Figure 1.2 shows the current configuration of the fictional drive as well as the planned configuration.
Figure 1.2.
Current and planned
configuration of the
fictional hard drive.
This example begins with a drive with one partition covering cylinders 1 to 1024. The goal is to shrink the first partition down to half its current size and create a new extended partition in the vacated space.
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| CAUTION |
It's always a good idea to backup your data before you change anything on your hard drive. Losing all of your data can be costly. |
fips is located on the CD-ROM that comes with this book. First, read the documentation on the CD-ROM in the \DOSUTILS directory. It gives detailed instructions and may cover questions you have. Second, back up the data on the hard drive if at all possible (and verify the backup to make sure it worked). Third, copy the fips.exe program from the \DOSUTILS directory to the bootable floppy you created earlier in the hour.
fips works by reallocating the free space at the end of your drive. So the next step is to defragment your drive. Windows 95 comes with Disk Defragmenter in its System Tools. Users of DOS need to find another tool such as the Norton Utilities. In this example, defragmenting ensures all 600MB of free space on the fictional drive is at the end.
Once the defragmentation is done, you are ready to resize the partition. Restart the machine using the bootable floppy, and at the DOS prompt run the fips command.
| CAUTION |
Be sure you have read the fips documentation located on the CD before you begin. |
After you have finished resizing your partition, remove the floppy and reboot your machine. If all went well, your existing operating system should boot up and be ready to go.