Linda Proulx wrote in a message to Jack Stein:

 JS> Make sure you work out your drive partitions as carefully as possible.
 JS> Do it on paper and give it a lot of thought, possibly post your
 JS> thoughts here as you will get a lot of opinions on how to partition.

 LP> Have 2 hard drives setup as follows:

 LP> C - 1G
 LP> D - 1G
 LP> E,F,G - 500 MB
 LP> H - 1G
 LP> I - 1G
 LP> J - 500 MB set up with a double space drive for temp files &
 LP> single use files, eg Win installs.

I assume thats 2 2.5 gig drives with E:, F: and G: sharing 500MB?  My personal 
feeling is to reduce your boot partitions in size by a LOT.  WIN95 need
perhaps 200MB, WARP 3 150, WARP 4 I'm not sure, I haven't installed it yet.  

 LP> Plan to install Warp on D & have E & possibly H as HPSF
 LP> drives for OS/2 only use programs as such as Win programs &
 LP> leave the rest for DOS stuff. 

I would not install WARP on a FAT partition, make it HPFS.  Make ALL your
partitions HPFS except those that will house WIN95 and it's applications/data.
Also remember you can only see ONE primary partition.  You MUST make your
WIN95 partition a primary partition.  OS/2 doesn't REQUIRE a primary
partition, it will boot from a logical partition.  This gives you a choice of
letting OS/2 see the WIN95 partition or not.  If you make 2 primary partitions 
(both will be C: and only one at a time can be active (seen)) then OS/2 will
never see your WIN95 partition.  If you make your OS/2 partition a logical
partition, then, you will be able to use your WIN95 partition (C:) when booted 
to OS/2 from your logical partitions (D: or E:)  I have 3 boot partitions, 2
are primary and one is logical.  My main OS/2 partition that I use is a
primary, so it is C: and I can't mess with my WIN95 partition when booted to
OS/2.  If I were to do it over, I would probably change both OS/2 partition so 
I could have access to my WIN95 partition at all times.

 LP> Am considering uninstalling
 LP> the double space but it is good for DOS program temp files.

 LP> Right now all Win related programs are on E & F.  G has my
 LP> BBS related stuff, C all DOS/computer utilities/drivers. D
 LP> editors, games, & misc. stuff.

Since you have two drives, I would try to back up everything, or everything I
wanted to keep that was not easy to install onto the second drive.  I would
put each partition in a directory named after the partition like CDRIVE or
DDRIVE and use a utility that would back it up into subdirectories matching
those on the drive.  (that makes it easy to restore later)  Use zip and save
the directories if you want, that works great.  Next, I'd install OS/2 and
FDISK and repartition my first drive, creating a bootmanager partition, and 2
or 3 boot partitions (I would keep them under 504MB in TOTAL.  (Thats why I
have 2 150MB and one 200MB partitions)  Since you don't need, nor should you
have your boot partitions as larger than this anyway, why make them any bigger 
than your system can read w/o drive translation. 

The rest of the drive is up to you to partition any way you want.  Just
remember that WIN95 cannot see HPFS partitions, and HPFS partitions are 10
times better than FAT partitions.  DOS and WIN3x run about PERFECT under OS/2, 
and with those running under OS/2, they work perfect in an HPFS partition.
It's only when booted to DOS/WIN95 that you can't use an HPFS partition.

 LP> Not planning to run any Win9X & if I ever do still have I
 LP> partition as potential for that use.

I would still install 3 boot partitions.  Make 2 OS/2 partitions, and install
OS/2 in both of them.  Make one the one you generally use, and one a copy of
that.  If you screw up one, you always have the other, or, if you want to test 
something like a Fixpac, or play around with something iffy, you don't need to 
worry, you have a spare just in case something goes wrong.  Later, when you
want to install win or linux, or, a new version of OS/2, you can reformat the
partition, install whatever you want.

 JS> megs total, you don't even need LBA addressing for your large 
 JS> drives.

 LP> What is LBA?

Large Block Addressing.  PC hardware cannot read large partitions (usually not 
over 504MB)  DOS and FAT need fancy crap to get around this limitation to read 
larger drives.  OS/2 doesn't have a problem with large numbers so, it is only
the boot partitions that must be under 1024 cylinders.  Once the system boots
past the system bios, OS/2 no longer uses the system to read the drives, it
loads it's own bios in memory, and it can count very large numbers, so no disk 
mangler softer is needed.  This is important to old systems like mine that
cannot do LBA.  I'm not a hardware guru, nor a system designer, so my
description may not be 100% accurate, but that is the gist of it.

 JS> the stuff on it I needed, no back-up was necessary.  That's the 
 JS> easiset thing to do, and you get a nice new drive out of the 
 JS> deal:-)

 LP> Not possible at this time. 

Understood.  Use your second drive to back up your first.  Then, your first
drive is free for you to FDISK and generally mess around with.  Make sure you
understand how the drive letters will look when you are finished.  The big
issue here is whether your second drive has a primary partition on it or not.  
If it does, it will be D:, not matter what.  This screws things up
tremendously, particularly when adding other drives, or replacing that drive.  
You are much better off not having a primary partition on the second drive,
that way, it is easier to figure, configure and reconfigure your drives.

If you have no primary's on your second drive, you will have like C: D: E: on
the first drive, F: G: H: on the second.  If you have a primary there, your
first partition on Drive 0 will be C:.  Your D: drive will be the primary on
drive 1.  E: will be the second partition on drive 0.  You can see this can be 
confusing later on.

Oh, one more tip.  When naming your drives, name them with things like HPFS G:
and HPFS BU F, WINDATA H.  That way, when you change things around, like
adding or replacing a drive, you don't get too screwed up with drive letters
changing.  You will know what drive you are looking at by what you named it. 
The actual letters might change but you know what it used to be.  This can be
very helpful, I learned that the hard way.

 LP> So what do folk think?

Hurry up and get it going, before Y2K kills off too many of the experienced
OS/2 people that can give you their ideas and experiences.  I'm a little
worried about FIDO being available to nearly as many people when Y2K blows up
a lot of old FIDO software.  A lot of sysops are going to disappear into the
night I'm afraid.

                                              Jack 
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