FIPS 1.5 - file SPECIAL.DOC
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S1. Use with Stacker/SuperStor/Doublespace etc.
S2. Use with OS/2
S3. Use with OnTrack Disk Manager and similar drivers


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S1. Use with Stacker/SuperStor/Doublespace etc.

These programs are used to increase disk space by compressing files. They
all work similarly. When installed, they create a compressed volume on the
disk, into which all the files are moved. This compressed volume is a big
file that fills up almost all space on the disk. After booting with the
compression driver, the previous drive C: that contains the compressed
volume is renamed to D:, and the compressed volume itself becomes C:.

From reports I received from users of Stacker and DoubleSpace, I distilled
the following scheme. If you have difficulties, please let me know.

a. Make sure that there is enough space on the compressed partition to be
   split.
b. Use the Checkdisk program that comes with the compression software.
c. Remove the Windows swapfile if you have one.
d. Decrease the size of the compressed volume with the utilities that come
   with the compression software.
e. Defragment the uncompressed drive that contains the compressed volume
   (in most cases drive D:)
f. use FIPS as described in FIPS.DOC

If your system will not let you defragment the uncompressed drive or if
the compressed volume can not be defragmented because it has the hidden
attribute set, FIPS might not offer as much space for the new partition
as is shown in the directory listing of the uncompressed drive. You should
add the following steps:

e1. Copy the defragmentation program (e.g. diskopt.exe, defrag.exe) of the
    system to the boot disk
e2. Boot without the compression device driver. This may be tricky, since in
    some systems the driver is part of the system files on the boot disk. Try
    using a boot disk from an older DOS version, or consult your manuals.
e3. Remove Hidden, Readonly and System attributes from compressed volume
    (use dir /a:h to find the name of the the compressed volume)
e4. Defragment the partition.

It was reported that you can use FIPS either with or without the compression
driver loaded.


S2. Use with OS/2

FIPS is known to have problems with OS/2, especially with the dual boot
feature. This is partly due to the fact that OS/2 dual boot uses two copies
of the boot sector - if only one copy is changed by FIPS, OS/2 will not
work properly.
But even when taking this into consideration, some people have reported
strange error messages by OS/2. I encourage you to give FIPS a try, but
make sure to save the root and boot sector to floppy disk with FIPS before
making any changes. FIPS might work if you

a. Remove dual boot from the partition if you use it. I don't know if and
   how this is possible, please consult your manual or call IBM. If you
   find out, please let me know, so that I can include this info.
b. Boot from a bootable DOS disk
c. Run FIPS (make sure to make FIPS save the root and boot sector to floppy)
d. Reboot, check if everything is ok under DOS
e. Boot from your OS/2 installation disk and reinstall dual boot if
   necessary.
f. Boot to OS/2 and look if everything works as expected.

If e. does not work (OS/2 complains with 'hardware error' or something
similar), use RESTORRB to undo the changes FIPS made, reboot again and
reinstall dual boot (if necessary).

So far I did not find out what OS/2 complains about. Since I do not use
OS/2, I have to rely on user reports. If you try FIPS with OS/2,
I would like to hear about it. Any information is welcome, even if it
is just "it worked" or "it did not work". If you have an idea what might
be the problem or any technical information, please tell me about it.


S3. Use with OnTrack Disk Manager and similar drivers

Note: Everything said here also applies to similar device drivers that
perform the same functions as OnTrack. OnTrack is just the most widely
used such system.

I'll try to start at the beginning:

Older BIOSes have a limit on the 'drive geometry' built in, i.e. they
can only properly handle disk drives of up to 1024 cylinders, 16 heads
and 63 sectors. Given a sector size of 512, this results in a total
limit of 504 MB. Most hard drives are far larger nowadays, especially
in the number of cylinders. So a method for accessing these large drives
had to be devised. For compatibility reasons, the cylinder and sector
count could not be extended, but there was still room in the number of
heads value - up to 256 heads.

Modern BIOSes (i.e. BIOSes prepared for EIDE drives) do exactly this,
they trick DOS into thinking that the disk has less than 1024 cylinders,
but more than 16 heads (this is indicated by 'extended sector translation'
or 'logical block addressing' in the BIOS setup). The same is true for
SCSI disks - in this case the translation is done by the BIOS of the
SCSI controller. If you have one of these, you will probably not be using
OnTrack anyway.

OnTrack Disk Manager is a special program that does the translation in
software. It installs its own boot program in the hard disk's master
boot record, so that it is loaded before any other disk access is
done. This means that you can not access the hard disk without loading
the OnTrack device driver first.

This is also true for FIPS. If you just boot from a floppy disk, you will
not be able to access the C: drive, and FIPS will not work. As far as
I know, you _must_ boot from the hard disk, after which FIPS will work
properly.

Note to Linux users: You can NOT use this scheme to create a Linux
partition. This is because the partitioning information that FIPS modifies
is on a level above the OTDM driver, so you can only access them after
having loaded the driver. Since Linux does not use DOS drivers, it can
not access the new partition. The only thing that Linux will see is a
large non-DOS partition: the OnTrack partition (system indicator byte
54h or 56h).

Unfortunately, I currently know of no way to get rid of the OnTrack
device driver or to split off a partition for use under Linux without
completely reformatting and thus losing all data. It might be possible,
given sufficient technical information, but since I personally don't
use it, I can't investigate further into this.

If you are prepared to reformat the disk (after backing up all your data),
you can just delete the OnTrack partition with Linux fdisk and create
new partitions as you require. Note that you can create a DOS partition
at the beginning of the disk. You won't need OnTrack to use it, as
long as its last cylinder is less than 1024. Linux of course has no
problems accessing the cylinders beyond 1024, so you can use all the rest
of the disk for Linux partitions. In case of problems, read the EIDE-
Mini-HOWTO, it contains some more information on this from the Linux
point of view.