trouble using fips

[Frank Carmickle]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:

> 
> Sounds to me like perhaps you did not defrag the disk before running fips.
> Fips will not do that for you, so it can only reduce your existing
> partition to the location of the "farthest out" allocated disk sectors. If

This being very true.  However this summer when using fips-2.0 after
defragging a disk I showed that half of the drive was not being used and
fips allowed me to use it.  Only problem was on exiting.  It crapped out
and left the disk in a complete mess unrecoverable.  If the damn slackware
distro had actually had boot floppies with parted on it I would have used
it.  I am unsure if the debian woody disks have it but there is a specific
package called parted-bf made for boot-floppies.  I believe that parted
allows you to change the size of partitions with out any
defragmentation.  It also allows many many more features then just cutting
the darn thing in two and then having to run some other fdisk session to
set it up the way you want it.  

-- 
     Frank Carmickle
phone:     412 761-9568
email:     frankiec at dryrose.com