Linda Proulx wrote in a message to Murray Lesser:

 ML> strange results.  Assume that you are going to repartition and
 ML> reinstall a few times during the learning process, so don't worry
 ML> too much about getting it right the first time.  It is fairly
 ML> hard to do any real damage under OS/2, especially if you avoid
 ML> "DEL *.*" commands and keep good backups .

 LP> Oh God!  I hope not.  I don't mind tweaking bit I really
 LP> don't want to install more than once. 

The important thing is to install your operating systems on small partitions.  
No need to backup up much of your operating system, as it is already backed up 
on your install disks.  Once you get a fancy desktop that you like (sometimes
never happens) then, you can back up you ini files.  I personally never had to 
re-install OS/2 and I've been running it since the October beta in 1991 I
believe it was.  

Make sure you work out your drive partitions as carefully as possible.  Do it
on paper and give it a lot of thought, possibly post your thoughts here as you 
will get a lot of opinions on how to partition.  Moving partitions around is a 
big pain, and can be scary.  Too often, it becomes clear how you _should_ have 
done things after you add a drive, or lose a drive and so on.  What Murry is
saying is that quite often, after you initially install and run OS/2 for a
bit, you think of better ways of doing things and start over again from
scratch.

My recommendation is create 3 boot partitions, around 150 - 300 megs each (I
run WARP 3 and WARP 3 connect in 150 meg partitions with plenty of room to
spare, and WIN95 in a 200 meg partition, with plenty of room to spare) Make
two of them HPFS and install OS2 on them, or linux on one, and WIN95 on a FAT
partition.  If you keep them all within 504 megs total, you don't even need
LBA addressing for your large drives.  (I run a 5 gig drive, and no disk
mangler, no LBA addressing available on this machine)

 LP> I'll be losing my Sparq soon.  Won't have the big backup 
 LP> solution.

When I switched intially, I bought a new drive, so my old drive had all the
stuff on it I needed, no back-up was necessary.  That's the easiset thing to
do, and you get a nice new drive out of the deal:-)

                                              Jack 
--- timEd/2-B11
278/111