tlug: Failed at the first post.

[Matt Gushee <matt@example.com>]

Stewart Dow writes:

 > Firstly hello to everyone on this list.

Hello to you too! Welcome.

 > I want to create a new partition of about 500MB onto which I want to install
 > Linux but the fips utility is saying that the biggest partition I can make
 > is 90MB.   The problem lies in a few random sectors that the Windows 95
 > defragmentation utility refuses to move.
 > 
 > 1)  Are there any utilities around for finding out which files are using
 > these sectors?

There is, or was, a DOS program called SHOWFAT.EXE which can give you
a complete mapping of files to physical disk locations. It's hard to
find, but you might try FTPSearch at

http://ftpsearch.ntnu.no/

My educated guess is that the worst culprits are your Registry files,
SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT.

 > 2)  I could just reformat the whole disk (810MB)  and install Linux from
 > scratch.  Linux can, I think, do anything I am likely to want to do with the
 > notebook apart from run Windows Encarta. I have Encarta 95 which I can't get
 > to run on my other machine which has NT4.  Has anyone ever heard of running
 > encarta under Linux. How dumb a question is this?

It's conceivable that you could run it under WINE, the WINdows
Emulator for Linux. It's still in a fairly early stage of development, 
but it seems to be more-or-less usable for some apps. Don't know about 
multimedia, though. Anything that needs full-screen display is
probably out.

URL for WINE:

http://www.winehq.org/  [.com ?]

Hope this helps a bit.

Matt Gushee
Oshamanbe, Hokkaido
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