Partition Magic or sleight of hand?

[downintheFIFTH]

Hello all,I've been contemplating Linux for a while and finally decided to take the plunge and partition my 20Gb hd for a red hat installation but it is FAT32.
So I acquired a copy of partition magic which as it says on the Powerquest site supports FAT/FAT32 systems,but the readme text with the program,in the general usage notes,advise not to run the program from a compressed drive! Eh?

So can I partition this compressed drive or not?
Is there anything can be done to un-compress the drive first?

Appreciate any advice on this,I was goin' great guns getting all gen'd up on stuff until just before actually doing something then I got well and truly stopped in my trax.:confused:

My first post/query on the Linux forum but ah've got a feeling it 'aint gonna be my last :rolling:

Ta :)

[Ironheart]

It doesn't sound like your drive is compressed...FAT32 is just the Windows9X native filesystem, no compression is involved unless you deliberately compress it using DriveSpace or something similar.

Most distributions will have a partitioning tool built into the install routine anyway. Mandrake does, and I assume Redhat does also.

In short, provided you haven't compressed it yourself just go ahead and install after a) running scandisk and defrag in Windows, and b) backing up all critical data, just in case something dodgy happens.

[downintheFIFTH]

Whooaa!Cheers for that slap on the forehead m8.:o

I,for some reason always thought FAT32 was a compression thing.Well that aside everything looks good to go,I got a free weekend,I got a pack o headache pills and if it all works then I'll get the beer.:E

[Ironheart]

No problem, good luck with it.

I'm on the verge of a Linux reinstall myself, to see if it'll fix my problems in my other thread.

[aef]

Originally posted by Ironheart
I'm on the verge of a Linux reinstall myself, to see if it'll fix my problems in my other thread.

I didn't reply there as I don't really know Gnome, but instead of reinstalling you might consider doing something like this:

* Make a temporary directory somewhere, say in /tmp or /home (make sure you have space for all your files there.)

* Copy all the files you want to keep from your home directory to the temporary directory. Use cp -r for subdrectories.

* Just in case, do tar cfz /tmp/home-backup.tgz ~

* su to root and rm -rf your home directory (user's home directory, not root's!)

* remove the user's entries from /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow with your text editor of choice (also possibly /etc/group)

* re-create your user account with useradd

* set a password for that user with passwd <username>

* do chown -R <username> <temporary directory>

* su to that use and copy your files back from the temporary directory.

[Ironheart]

Ta, will give that a go :)