*BSD News Article 75358


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From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Can't get partition
Date: Sat, 03 Aug 1996 20:12:11 -0700
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DuckHunter wrote:
> 
> Like I said before, I can't partition my (up till now) Win95 ide disk.
> All the space I can get for a FreeBSD partition is 1 meg, but I've got
> 660 megs free. I've tried Fdisk and it won't work because of some
> problem with Win95. I don't want to format the whole disk. And FIPS
> doesn't work either; it says "Last sector not free" Can anybody help?

This one comes up periodically; you might want to check some recent posts 
on this topic. Anyway, a few things to check first:

1. Make sure you're not using a compression utility. With proces on large 
hard drives dropping so fast, you shouldn't need it anyway, and it can 
lead to serious problems.

2. Defrag your hard drive completely. If the stuff at the back end of the 
drive is locked in place and won't move, turn off the swap file in Win95 
and then defrag again. If you have files marked read-only or hidden, 
you'll have to turn that off as well.

3. Now you can run the FIPS utility. Leave enough free space in your 
Win95 partition for the swap file and reaqsonable additional storage. You 
can enable the swap file again after FIPS is done.

4. Run DOS fdisk to remove the "extra" primary DOS partition created by 
FIPS.

5. Proceed to install FreeBSD by booting from the boot floppy and 
following the prompts and procedures.

6. Do not try to mount the DOS/Win95 partition in FreeBSD: FIPS can't 
change the cluster size and that can cause some bodacious problems. If 
you *must* mount the DOS partition and access it, you'll have to kill the 
DOS partition with fdisk, recreate it again, and then reformat before 
installing Win95. 

I hope this helps!
-- 
Ken

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