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Old January 6th 05, 04:45 PM
Trent©
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On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 07:12:36 -0500, "Zip" wrote:

Put a third clean 200+MB hard drive in with a fat 16 partition.


Is there any way to create a FAT 16 partition on the XP NTFS hard drive
without a re-format? A re-format is really not an option at this time.


You'll need a 3rd party program that can work with
partitions...Partition Manager, Partition Magic, etc. You'll need to
resize the current partition...making it smaller so that you have room
for the new partition. Then create the new FAT 16 partition...making
sure you keep it under 2 gig.

Boot with the drive space (or other) driver enabled boot disk.


I tried this just to see if I could look at the drive-spaced data. When I
did this, both the NTFS hard drive (expected) and the Maxtor FAT 16 hard
drive (unexpected) were not recognized, or at least not assigned accessible
drive letters.


You need to load these drivers thru an autoexec.bat file and/or a
config.sys file (I forget which one) on the floppy. But, as I
suggested, it would be just as easy to boot from that drive...and
create a FAT16 partition on the XP drive...as you suggested. When it
boots, you'll see all of that drive...and you'll see the new FAT16
partition. Copy over the files that you want to that new partition.
Then go back and boot to the XP drive...and you'll see that drive and
the FAT16 drive.

When you booted from that floppy...

You didn't see the NTFS drive because you booted from a DOS system
disk.

You didn't see the Maxtor drive because you didn't load any drivers
for the compressed volume...thru autoexec and config.

One more option you may have...

You can boot from the Maxtor...and then unmount that compressed
volume. But usually there's not enough room left on the drive to do
that.

Copy the data off the compressed second drive, to the non compressed third
drive.
Then reboot win xp and get access to the non compressed files.


If a FAT 16 partition cannot be created without a reformat, would there be a
devious way to dump the drive-spaced data to the CD burner, or a USB jump
drive, or something?


Yes...there is a way...too lengthy to explain in detail. It amounts
to loading the drivers for those drives...so that you can see them.

I don't know what type of support win xp has for mounting compressed drive
volumes.
The other people here should be able tell you that info.


You'd think think that someone would have developed a little Windows GUI by
now that would allow people access to their DOS-compressed drives in the
modern Windows world.


AFAIK, you are the first person I've seen in many a moon that's had a
compressed volume problem! lol Who would pay for such a GUI !! LOL

The 8MB, or so, free space, is the uncompressed space that drive space
reserves for critical drivers that can't be put in a compressed volume.


To add to this...

When you boot into that drive, you should see 2 drives...C & D. One
is the compressed volume...the other uncompressed. And the drive
letters are swapped to protect the innocent. lol

Good luck. Let us know how you make out.


Have a nice one...

Trent©

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