Message-ID: <004301c094dd$1eee7080$8eb6abd4@WhiteDragon>
From: "White Dragon" <white DOT dragon AT tin DOT it>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
References: <000201c0946b$54e3ca40$1bb4abd4 AT WhiteDragon> <00b701c09482$683b7400$29822a40 AT dbcooper>
Subject: Re: Hard Disk 20gb and dos
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 10:31:29 +0100
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400
Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

just tryed. It doesn't work. It says i don't have enough space to create and
activate a new partition. Actually i have 5 gb free (not partitioned), after
cylinder 1871. Maybe, i'm gonna backup everything and try to partition my
disk with drdos. Maybe drdos cannot go after 8.4 gb on a big disk, but it
can still use space below that level. So i'm going to create a 1 gb fat16
partition from cylinder 1 to 130. After installing dr-dos i will create
another two partitions from cylinder 131 to 2495 using fat32 (in which i
will install windoze, i still need it) . I don't know if it is going to
work, but maybe it is worth trying. I guess that disk manager it is not
free. But, there is a free public version (or clone)?
Wait a moment! What exactly do diskmanager? I know that is a kind of bios
translator which overrides the 8.4gb barrier on older systems, but it can be
still used to force dos to recognize bigger disks? And what about drdos
7.05? I've heard that has fat32 drivers, but also lots of problems (such as
file renaming!!! unbelivable!).
Maybe i could install first 7.05 and after copying ibmdos.com (or the other
one, i don't remember exactly) version 7.03 over the new one. Hoping that is
not that file that controls fat32...

Answer to your question:
Under win98 i don't feel urged to reduce the cluster size 'cause my average
file size is 226k, and i guess this is common for everyone who uses windoze.
It has to be said, that i use to zip small files when i dont need them, in
order to store them in one file. For example, yesterday i packed all my old
*.log files created by mirc 'cause the average log size was 2k-4k and my
cluster size was 16k. It resulted in 6 mb of slack space. I used to have one
big partition because i needed the maximum continous space avalaible
(ripping DVD is an hard work... ;-)) Now i have a cluster size of 8k and two
partitions which is a good compromise.
I belive there is a (slightly) loss of  performance using a fat table too
big. I don't think it is worthy, and after all, my slack % is only 2%...
50mb over 2.33gb of files.
On my ancient 80mb ibm I had a slack which surpassed 15mb and at the time i
didn't have the knowledge to partition my disk...

Well, it is all for now. I'm eager to install dos again and play with my
config.sys to gain those few kilobytes of conventional memory...

----- Original Message -----
From: Patrick Moran
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Sent: Monday, February 12, 2001 12:13 AM
Subject: Re: Hard Disk 20gb and dos


Try using DRDOS   FDISK /X  and see if you can change your partitions.

Question:  Why would anyone want to make a 2GB FAT 16 partiton? You will
probably waste 2/3 to 3/4 of the space or even more depending on the number
of files because of slack space. The maximum you can make with DRDOS is 2GB
because the maximum DOS cluster size is 64 sectors per cluster. This is 32KB
per cluster. You will waste on average 16KB per file on the drive. If you
only had 20,000 files on a 2GB partition you would waste 320MB of space and
a lot more with all of those little files that are less than 8KB.

If you plan on storing large files such as MP3s, MPEGs, AVIs, etc on a 2GB
partition then that would be fine. That is what I use my about 650MB
partition for. I don't have 10,000 to 50,000 files on it. My actual DOS
partitions for DOS and DOS apps and data files are 70+ MB and 255MB on a
345MB IDE drive (329MB formatted.)

This has always been one of my gripes about PC DOS from the very beginning
of using IBM PCs. FAT 16 and FAT 12 partitions are so wastefull. Back in my
early days of IBM PCs I had a Seagate ST-251 which I RLL'd to about 64MB and
made two 32MB partitions and used Disk Manager to force 512 Byte clusters.
Starting with DOS 3.3 the default was 4 sectors per cluster as the smallest,
but you could FDiSK it with Disk Manager and change it to 1 sector per
cluster @ <32MB, 2 sectors per cluster @ <64MB. There is a point where
adding more space to a partition under FAT 16, that you can actually lose
usable space.

I figure that to be partitions of 512MB or greater. People would buy those
540MB drives and make a single partition out of them. By simply not using
the last couple of megabytes of drive space, they would actually gain
useable space and could store more files. (540MB is about 514MB formatted.)
If you would like to see this, there is a program called DRVSLACK.EXE that
will show exactly how much space is being wasted. It is small enough that I
could attach it to a message to this list if anyone wants it. It is only 7KB
unzipped, probably half that zipped.

On the 650MB partition I am using 400MB and am wasting 9MB and would only
waste 1MB if I divided it up into 255MB partitions. That is 9 times the
waste and would be a lot more than that if these were typical DOS files.
These are large zip files with a few small text files and zip files, etc.
but mostly large zip, rar, etc. Driveslack will also show you how much will
be wasted for 2k, 4k, 8k and 16k clusters. That way you can see what would
be gained by making smaller partitions.

This is how my C: drive looks:

total        77,721,600
free           9,715,712
used       65,599,249

cluster size 2k

used      67,766,222
slack       2,170,023

cluster size 16k

used      86,573,056
slack     20, 978,807

Notice I would need another 9MB of space than what I have and have none left
over with 16k clusters. Drive Slack only shows to what it would be up to 16k
clusters. It does not show 32k clusters, but each step up is a little over
double the last step. so 32k clusters would probably be around 45MB of
wasted space. That is more than half. If I unzipped the files I have zipped
on this drive (docs for PKZIP, ARJ, LHA, and a bunch other as well as the
TIDs for DOS and Personal Netware and many others, as these are fairly
large, it would be much worse.)

I figured it out once and found that with everything unzipped and using a
540MB drive partitioned into a single drive, I would waste well over half
the space and if I just wasted the extra 2MB of space on a 540MB drive I
would lose less than 1/4 of the drive space! i.e. I would gain over 135MB of
space and if I divided it into two partitions of 255MB each, I would only
lose about 10% of space and gain a whopping 300MB of space or something
close to that. 32K clusters would be even worse.

I also force FAT 32 to 1K clusters. I can do that with DRDOS 7.03 FDISK.
That prbably is not neccessary because WINDOZE crap is so bloated anyway,
there isn't that much room fo slack space! Remeber a game called LOAD RUNNER
for the Commodore C-64? It was also available for the APPLE ][. You could
run that game on a 32KB computer with DOS loaded. The IBM DOS version was in
the 100K's range and the WINDOZE 95 version is in the megabytes!!!!!! Talk
about bloated!!!!!! BTW that game would run after it was loaded on an APPLE
or Commodore without having to leave the diskette in the drive! i.e. the
whole program was loaded into memory (IIRC.)

Pat

----- Original Message -----
From: White Dragon
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2001 12:50 PM
Subject: Hard Disk 20gb and dos


First of all, hello to everybody. This is my first day here.
I've got a Western digital 20gb 7200 rpm (i think it belongs to the "caviar"
series...).
4 years ago i had a 80mb ibm (My beloved ps2 386!!!) and ms-dos 6.22. So i
decided to install that dos again. I partitioned my hd in this way
primary 15 gb fat32 partition
primary 1 gb fat16 partition
extended 4 gb fat32 partition.
I decided to make bootable the second, becouse i had to install dos there.
But... ms-dos fdisk doesn't recognize at all my hd. Well, exactly it doesn't
report space in a correct way. So i tryed with dr-dos 7.03.
This one recognize correctly all the space and partition type but it cannot
modify them.
I know that dos operating systems have 8.4 gb limitation, but there is a way
to override it?
And what if i put the fat16 partition in the first 8.4 gb (using dr-dos
fdisk)? For example:
primary 1 gb fat16 partition
primary 15-19gb fat32 partition
Well... another question. Adding fat32 drivers in the first installation
disk would help?
Sorry to bother all of you for such things, but i need help.