Partitioning with FIPS

As a convenience to our customers, we provide the FIPS utility. This is a freely available program that can resize FAT (File Allocation Table) partitions. It is included on the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM in the dosutils directory. If your using NTFS partitions, FIPS will not work.

Note

Many people have successfully used FIPS to repartition their hard drives. However, because of the nature of the operations carried out by FIPS, and the wide variety of hardware and software configurations under which it must run, Red Hat cannot guarantee that FIPS will work properly on your system. Therefore, no installation support whatsoever is available for FIPS; use it at your own risk.

That said, if you decide to repartition your hard drive with FIPS, it is vital that you do two things:

Perform a Backup — Make two copies of all the important data on your computer. These copies should be to removable media (such as tape, CD-ROM, or diskettes), and you should make sure they are readable before proceeding.
Read the Documentation — Completely read the FIPS documentation, located in the dosutils/fipsdocs directory on the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM 1.

Should you decide to use FIPS, be aware that after FIPS runs you will be left with two partitions: the one you resized, and the one FIPS created out of the newly freed space. If your goal is to use that space to install Red Hat Linux, you should delete the newly created partition, either by using fdisk under your current operating system, or while setting up partitions during a custom-class installation.

The following instructions are a simplified version of the FIPS documentation file, fips.doc, located in the FIPS directory (/dosutils/fips20/*). These instructions should apply in most instances. If you encounter any problems, see the documentation file.

From Windows:
- Do a full backup.
- Run scandisk to verify that the hard drive contains no bad clusters.
- Decide how to distribute the available space on the hard drive between the operating systems. Use Windows Explorer to see the free space on the drive. Make a note of the space (in megabytes) that each operating system will have.
- If you do not have one, create a Windows boot disk.
  Creating a boot disk varies between different versions of Windows. Consult the Windows documentation for instructions on creating a Windows boot disk.
  The diskette will be formatted, and COMMAND.COM, along with the associated hidden files (IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, and DBLSPACE.BIN), will be copied to the diskette.
- Copy the following files on the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM to the DOS boot disk.
  
      dosutils/fips20/fips.exe
      dosutils/fips20/restorrb.exe
      dosutils/fips20/errors.txt
      dosutils/fips20/fips.doc
      dosutils/fips20/fips.faq
- Defragment the hard drive so that all the data on the hard drive is located at the beginning of the drive.
Insert the Windows boot disk into the floppy drive and reboot the system.

Start FIPS (type fips at the prompt).

When FIPS begins, you'll find a welcome screen similar to the following:

FIPS version 2.0, Copyright (C) 1993/4 Arno Schaefer
FAT32 Support, Copyright (C) 1997 Gordon Chaffee

DO NOT use FIPS in a multitasking environment like Windows, OS/2, Desqview,
Novell Task manager or the Linux DOS emulator; boot from a DOS boot disk first.

If you use OS/2 or a disk compressor, read the relevant sections in FIPS.DOC.

FIPS comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, see file COPYING for details.

This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; again, see file COPYING for details.

Press any key.

When you press a key, a root partition screen will appear. (Note that, if the computer has more than one hard drive, you'll be asked to select which one you want to partition.)

When you press a key, details about the hard drive, such as the following, will appear.

Boot sector:
Bytes per sector: 512
Sectors per cluster: 8
Reserved sectors: 1
Number of FATs: 2
Number of rootdirectory entries: 512
Number of sectors (short): 0
Media descriptor byte: f8h
Sectors per FAT: 145
Sectors per track: 63
Drive heads: 16
Hidden sectors: 63
Number of sectors (long): 141057
Physical drive number: 80h
Signature: 29h

Checking boot sector ... OK
Checking FAT ... OK
Searching for free space ... OK

Do you want to make a backup copy of your root and boot sector before
proceeding? (y/n)

You should select [y], for yes, to make a backup copy of your root and boot sector before proceeding with FIPS.

Next, you will be presented with the following message:

Do you have a bootable floppy disk in drive A: as described in the
documentation? (y/n)

Verify that a DOS boot disk is in the floppy drive, and type [y], for yes. A screen similar to the following will appear, allowing you to resize the partition.

Writing file a:\rootboot:000

Enter start cylinder for new partition (33-526)

Use the cursor keys to choose the cylinder, <enter> to continue

Old partition           Cylinder              New partition
 258.9 MB                  33                   3835.8 MB

Figure G-1. Partition Resizing Screen

The initial values allocate all free space on the disk to the new partition. This is not what you want, because this setting would leave no free space on your Windows partition. Press the [right arrow] to increase the size of the Windows partition and decrease the size of the new (Linux) partition; press the [left arrow] to decrease the size of the Windows partition and increase the size of the Linux partition. When the sizes are what you want, press [Enter]. A verification screen will appear.

If you type r (to re-edit the partition tables), Figure G-1 reappears, allowing you to change the partition sizes. If you answer c, a confirmation screen, Figure G-2, appears:

New boot sector:

Boot sector:
Bytes per sector: 512
Sectors per cluster: 8
Reserved sectors: 1
Number of FATs: 2
Number of rootdirectory entries: 512
Number of sectors (short): 0
Media descriptor byte: f8h
Sectors per FAT: 145
Sectors per track: 63
Drive heads: 16
Hidden sectors: 63
Number of sectors (long): 141057
Physical drive number: 80h
Signature: 29h

Checking boot sector ... OK

Ready to write new partition scheme to disk
Do you want to proceed (y/n)?

Figure G-2. FIPS Confirmation Screen

Answering y completes the resizing operation. A harmless error message may occur, stating in effect that FIPS cannot reboot the system.

After a successful operation, the disk will have two partitions. The first partition (hda1 or sda1) will be used by Windows. We recommend that you start Windows (remember to remove the boot disk from drive A:) and run scandisk on drive C:.

If you encounter any problems (for example, Windows will not boot), you can reverse the FIPS resizing operation with the restorrb.exe command, which you copied to your DOS boot disk. In case of any errors, read the FIPS documentation files (fips.doc and fips.faq), which describe a number of factors that could cause the resizing operation to fail. If all else fails, you can restore Windows with the backup you made.

The second partition (hda2 or sda2) contains the space that the Red Hat Linux installation program will use. When the Disk Druid screen appears during installation, delete this partition (the installation manual explains how), then proceed with Linux partitioning.