(Excerpts from a message dated 11-08-99, Linda Proulx to Andy Roberts,
original topic: Get Going);

Hi Linda--

    I am breaking in to what is really none of my business, but I think
that if you follow the advice of a "guru" who doesn't seem to know much
about OS/2, you are going to be very disappointed with your OS/2
experience.  (See tagline for disclaimer!)  Much of what he advises is
contrary to what several very experienced OS/2 users have told you on
this echo.  Note: Quotes from your guru's message to you are prefaced
with "HS>".  IIRC, the following (unattributed) paragraph was quoted by
your guru from an earlier message from Peter to you:

 > .......  OTOH if all your partitions were "primary", then none of
 >them would be able to see any of the others on the same HD.  [It's
 >after 1AM, so I hope I got that right.  If not, someone else will
 >correct me, I'm sure.]

HS>This is a common belief, but wrong, at least for DOS and Win95. 
  >These 2 OS's do see all the primary partitions on a single hard
  >drive.  Your machine is living proof (at least for DOS).  I can't
  >swear to it, but I'm almost sure that OS/2 would also see them all.

    Taken in context, the unattributed paragraph is entirely correct. As
I remember the original, the topic being discussed was Boot Manager.  If
all your bootable partitions are primary partitions on the same drive,
they all have the same partition letter (usually C: on the first HD,
since neither DOS nor Windows can boot from any other partition).  As a
consequence, none of the booted systems can see any other bootable
partition because you can have only one active C: drive on a system at a
time.  (Your guru should have known this!)  With this exception, in
general, OS/2 can see all primary partitions and extended partitions,
but may not be able to read them.  OTOH, neither DOS nor Win95 can see
partitions formatted HPFS, whether primary or extended.  This is not a
valid reason not to use HPFS for big partitions; perhaps it is a valid
reason not to boot DOS nor Win95 :-).

HS>If you explain this to him, he'll no doubt ask how the heck (and
  >possibly why the heck) you created 4 primary partitions on one drive,
  >since FDISK will refuse to directly do this.  The answer to "how" is
  >that I used my bag of tricks - a combination of FDISK and Norton
  >Utilities.  "Why" is a much longer story.

    Do not ever, ever, ever, use Norton Utilities (or any other
DOS/Windows disk-fixer utility) on a partition (or drive) containing
OS/2 files, UNLESS you are really an expert on the OS/2 internal file
structures and know exactly what you are doing!!!

    At the worst, you will lose your desktop, which is mainly stored as
OS/2 Extended Attributes.  The FAT file system used by OS/2 is "backward
compatible" to that used by DOS/Windows to the extent that it can read
DOS FAT files, but the reverse is not quite true.  OS/2 FAT uses two
"reserved" bytes in the DOS FAT directory structure to point to the
"attached" file that contains the Extended Attributes belonging to that
"owning" file.  OS/2 also has a "dummy" file (EA DATA. FS) in the root
directory of any FAT partition containing EAs, that is used to keep
track of which portions of the physical file space on that partition
hold EAs (this file is not normally displayed by an OS/2 FAT "DIR"
command; "DIR /A" will display it).  DOS has no provisions to see this
file (note the "illegal" file name).  A DOS "drive fixer" utility may
wipe out all your EAs while "fixing" what it found to be a "corrupted"
directory :-(.  At best, some DOS "defragger" utilities (that recognize
OS/2's existence) don't wipe out the EA "files" but leave them where
they were, rather than moving them to follow their "owner" files in
physical sequence; thereby reducing performance when reading files
containing EAs.  This would be especially noticeable when the system is
loading a large REXX program.

    Incidentally, IMO, it is very poor practice to install more primary
partitions than are needed, because this unnecessarily limits
flexibility for future changes.  To my knowledge, this means a
reasonable maximum of two primary partitions per hardware system, both
of which should be on the first HD.  Most non-Microsoft operating
systems that I know of, capable of running on an Intel x86, can boot
from an extended partition.  Thus, two primary partitions are sufficient
for booting both DOS and some version of Windows (or two versions of
Windows, as having both DOS and Win/95 bootable seems somewhat
superfluous) as well as one (or more) "real" operating system(s).  If
you are content to live with only one (or no) Microsoft operating
system, you need only one primary partition--the minimum required by the
PC hard-drive architecture.

HS>The 1 GB partitions have clusters of 16 KB (16 kilobyte) size, and
  >the smaller ones have clusters of 8 KB size.  Both use 16-bit
  >integers in the cluster table (which is the FAT) to represent the
  >clusters (that's what FAT16 means).

    1 GB is entirely too large for a FAT-formatted partition under OS/2,
except under very special circumstances.  The cluster-size argument is a
red herring; for performance reasons, no FAT partition with much write
activity should be so full that this has any appreciable effect on
usable storage.  FAT performance (somewhat better under OS/2 than under
DOS) begins to drop off rapidly for partition sizes greater than about
250 MB, or if there are more than about 250 files in that partition.  It
is highly recommended (in an IBM OS/2 white paper) that one never use
FAT partitions (of any size) containing more than 500 files.  There is
also a file-number performance limitation for HPFS: HPFS performance
starts to degrade if you have more than 5000 files in the same
_directory_.

    As many on this echo have told you, 1 GB is much too big for an OS/2
boot partition.  The boot partition should not contain data, only
operating system.  In fact, it need not even contain all the files that,
technically, might be considered to be part of the operating system :-).
The more junk you have in the boot drive ("drive" is poor, but common,
nomenclature), the harder you will find it to do system maintenance.

    I have a total of "only" 1 GB HD space on my current system (a
ThinkPad 365XD).  My boot drive (Warp 4 FixPak 5) is a bit over 200 MB,
and has only those files that may be updated by a FixPak.  (I have not
installed Win-OS/2, nor voice recognition; the "network" directories:
tcpip, mptn, etc., are installed in another partition.)  There is only
one primary partition, since I cannot conceive of any reason to want
more.  My "top" drive letter is K: for the 100 MB Zip drive.

    To avoid the necessity for reinstall, you want to be able to
reformat your boot drive and reconstitute it from its backup, any time
some misadventure blows your system (such as having installed a FixPak
that, much later, proves to have been hazardous to the health of one or
more of your applications).  I back up my boot drive any time I have
made a permanent change (I keep two generations of backup) to Iomega
parallel-port Zip diskettes using the BACKUP and RESTORE utilities
furnished with OS/2.  Since there are no "data" files in that partition,
there is no necessity for frequent backups.

    Partitioning is probably the most important decision you will make
relative to your OS/2 installation, and should not be based on a trivial
reason such as "not wanting too many drive letters" :-).  As Jack told
you, proper partitioning includes the decisions as to what is going to
go into which partition, for ease of future system maintenance.  This
depends on what you are going to do with your system, as well as how
much space you have.  "Data" files should be in partitions of their own,
since they are the only files requiring frequent back up.

    I reiterate what has been told to you by many of your correspondents
in this echo: "OS/2 IS NOT DOS!"  Most certainly, it is not Win95 :-).
Installing it as though it were either will only get you into trouble.

    Most people who have installed OS/2 successfully have not been
handicapped by knowing any guru.  I suggest you do what we have done:
learn by trial and error, aided by a consensus of members of this
conference as necessary.  Unless, of course, you can find a real OS/2
guru :-).

    Good luck,

        --Murray

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 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future

--- Maximus/2 2.02