"N9WOS" wrote in message
...
Drive Space! Man, I haven't heard that term in 10 years (coincidentally,
since the last time I dealt with this drive).

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.

I didn't say, "reformat", I said to put a third hard drive in, separate
from
The XP NTFS drive, and the compressed drive.

The problem with creating a fat16 partition on the primary drive is the
Fact that DOS 6.22 can only fully use a hard disk that is 8GB or less in
size.
(excluding added drivers)
And it can only use a partition that is 2GB or less in size.
So the basic maximum limit is four, 2GB drives on an 8GB disk
(excluding added drivers)
DOS 6.22 can't see a partition that is beyond the 8Gb harddisk limit.
(excluding..bla bla bla you get the point...)
You can make one that starts beyond the 8GB level, but it can't use it.
And to make a partition on your primary drive,
it would most likely come after the large primary partition,
(Bigger than 8GB.)
Which would put it out of the range of the DOS6.22 OS

Thanks, I was not aware of this, and it may have been something I would try.
To summarize (let me just get this straight), DOS 6.22 will recognize any
partition on any hard drive if the following three conditions are met:

1) The partition is FAT 16
2) The partition is no greater than 2 GB
3) The partition falls within the first 8 GB of the hard disk

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. Strangely enough, the DVD-ROM and the CD-RW
were recognized as R: and S:, respectively. I used "Alt 1" for Dos 6.22
from bootdisk.com

The problem with that is the "drive space" drivers are not loaded by the
boot disk,
Unless you have a boot disk that is made with a computer that already has
drive space on it.

smacks self Yeah, I forgot about that. But it was fun playing around with
a system that had a floppy drive, DVD drive, CD burner, and no hard drives.
Well, not really.

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?

The USB drive has some level of possibility.
There is USB drivers for DOS.

Suggestion, remove the large xp hard drive,
And install the Maxtor drive as the primary C drive.
That will allow you to just turn on the computer,
and it will boot from the "drive space" drive which has all the needed
drivers.
It will boot up where you have native access to the drive space drive.
The drive space drive will be assigned to the C drive, and the
uncompressed
Drive will be assigned to drive Z.. or something (I have forgotten)

Then you can do two things from there.
One...
Take and install USB drivers in the dos installation on the compressed
drive.
(It's up to you to find those, just try google.)
That will allow you to mount a USB drive and give it a usable drive
letter.
And you can copy the data from the compressed drive to the USB drive.

I think this is the alternative I'd like to try first. Question, though.
What is the file system on the USB drive? FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS? Do I need to
format the USB drive before hand?

Thanks again!