Date: Tue, 30 Nov 93 22:26:43 PST
From: Vaughan Pratt <pratt AT CS DOT Stanford DOT EDU>
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Partition splitter

I received a couple of requests about the partition splitter so let me
advertise its whereabouts.  It is /pub/msdos/dskutl/fips08.zip on
simtel mirrors (e.g. oak.oakland.edu), dated July 93.  Archie fips08.zip
lists a number of other sites.

The problem fips addresses is the inconvenience of having to restore
your DOS partition after you've split off a Linux (or whatever)
partition.  Fips lets you split in place; the only movement of your DOS
files is whatever is necessary to compress them down to the start of
the partition, for which you use DEFRAG or similar (use the full
optimization).  Fips then steps in and proceeds with what I cautiously
take to be admirable caution to figure out whether it's safe to do the
split you request, and only when everything looks kosher does it go
ahead.

The fact that fips can be run in place without any use of the floppy
drive is almost incidental from the point of view of the motivating
application, but is crucial to my application.

Incidentally I received helpful suggestions from djgpp readers Jim
Thomas, Brian Rice, Charles Sandmann, Mark Wood, Paul Bramel, and Dave
Holt.  The commonest suggestion was rawrite.exe, but this won't do
because it is dedicated to writing to floppies.  Rawrite.c is on
sunsite and it shouldn't be too hard to fix that.  But at 425 lines
rawrite.c is a lot of code, a program to just copy a file to a
partition should be 50 lines at most.

I received two offers of "code needing work" that I may take up.  But
before I do I will ask around on a couple other usegroups.

When I told Slackware's Pat Volkerding my problem, he told me that
someone has plugged the Handbook drive into another machine as his way
round it.  Warranty considerations aside, this looks a tad tricky to
me.  The drive has a 44-pin connector on about 1/16" pin spacing
instead of the standard 40-pin connector on .1" spacing, and a suitable
connector and cable can't be distributed on the internet the way a
software solution can.  But if you have the resources to make up the
cable and get the pins right, it's certainly one solution.

Vaughan Pratt