Shrink FAT32 Partition?

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Shrink FAT32 Partition?
started by: 7up

Posted by 7up on June 14 2008,09:57

First of all, hello everyone here at the DSL boards! I know my account has been laying around for a while, but I temporarily lost interest and resumed work on my Windows based projects.
Since my interest in wanting to learn how to use Linux some months back, I've been reading up on everything I've missed out on during the years. I searched around for awhile and found some really good distros I plan on using later, but I was looking for one to spring-board myself into Linux, without the risk of screwing up my Vista PC, then I found DSL. It was so damn perfect for a Compaq I have in my house, so I thought, 'Why not put DSL on it?'
In short, I want to dual boot DSL on a old Compaq in my house. (I could do it on my primary, Vista PC that I'm typing from right now, but I don't want that one to screw up if something goes wrong!)
The PC in question is a Compaq Presario 4540, 32 megabytes of RAM, 223mhz AMD processor, 2MB on board video-memory, 3 gig hard-drive with a FAT32 partition, 2 USB ports and a Lynksys wireless network card, all running on Windows 98SE.
The DSL live cd works great with the boot option dsl vga=785, so it's perfect for this machine. I understand that DSL can install itself easily with either boot loader of choice, but I can't find the right way to shrink the 3 gig FAT32 partition so that DSL will have enough room to install itself. Is there another way besides the things I've already tried? If so, please explain it to me like I'm an idiot, even though I'm not. I know my way around Windows, but Linux is a whole new world to me.
Here are the things that I have tried:
-Bled the DSL WIKI dry on every topic, no help on shrinking FAT32 Partitions.
-Gparted, the damned thing didn't have enough RAM to load up the Gnome GUI! I might be able to work around the GUI, but I don't know my way around in the command-prompt yet.
-Tools that comes with DSL, they can't shrink partitions, let alone a FAT32 partition.
-Qparted won't work because I don't actually have a Linux OS running natively in the first place. (Or if that PC had enough RAM to load up other damned live-cd distros with Qparted in them.)
-Frugal install, it couldn't find the iso no matter what I did and I heard it's horribly slow with 32 megabytes of RAM.
-Lots of other stupid, dumb partition editors that can shrink other partitions, but not FAT32 partitions!
-'Swiss Knife' sounded like a good idea, but I can't find a simple download link for it.
-banging my head on the keyboard!
-Partition Magic might work if I felt like spending excessive amounts of money that would be better spent on a decent-used graphics card rather than a few thousand lines of code that I might only execute 5 or 6 six times in my whole life.
-Trying to find Free Partition editors for Windows wouldn't turn up anything good either.
-Currently exploring emulating it through the VMware player on my Vista PC. The distro boots with 'vga=normal' just fine, but the default X window system has serious mouse issues, so I have to use the other one. (This also happens on the live cd in the Compaq.)

Posted by curaga on June 14 2008,10:59

There are two command line tools for messing with fat partitions, both quite suited for you, and both available from MyDSL:
- fips is a dos-based fat partition shrinker, it's on the fd-utils floppy image
- parted is in MyDSL, it's the GNU partition editor that both Gparted and Qparted use as a backend. It's not hard to use and can do just about anything to any partition

edit: fips is also available from many mirrors as zip, and you could also do a manual frugal install without changing the partition at all.
It's better to have their own partitions though.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on June 14 2008,17:48

Or you could keep your dos/win98+bootloader and use something like Loadlin

32mb is fine for a frugal setup, but you may be more contrained should you want to use many extensions. You'd probably want to use swap though.

Posted by 7up on June 16 2008,08:34

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I can't figure out how to connect to the Internet through the damn thing, so fips sounds like it's worth a try. I have decided I'm going to go with the frugal setup, but not without creating a swap-partition first, like ^thehatsrule^ said, otherwise I couldn't use Lilo or Grub for boot-loaders in the Frugal install within DSL, as there wouldn't be any room for the swap partition the install would try to create.
Btw, I've found DSL to be very good at reformatting floppies, if not better than when Windows does it, I never seen a floppy formatted in Windows hold 1.72mb on it. (I tried that to see if I could install DSL on a USB drive and boot it through the floppy, but the drive had a retarded write-protect switch on it, so the kernel panicked during boot-up, crappy USB drive idea scratched off the list.)

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I forgot to mention I tried Loadlin too, it couldn't find the iso no matter what I tried. So I'm going to have to shrink my FAT32 partition to make room for a swap partition and allow DSL to use a different boot-loader, instead. Glad to hear 32mb is actually fine for frugal, I don't plan on adding a crap load of extensions, so I'm good.
Btw, which boot loader do you think would be best, Lilo or Grub? If either are pretty much the same, which one is better looking graphically speaking?
Hmm, DSL and Puppy4.0 are running well beyond my expectations in VMware player, I can use it to see how these distros run on a higher end PC as well. I'm having fun running Windows XP Pro in it too, I really miss XP. lol
I appreciate the help guys, all this stuff is giving me a head-ache, it's nice to have somebody else give me some advice on my situation. I'll post again in this topic if I have any success or further problems.

Posted by curaga on June 16 2008,09:00

I'm a grub user *wink*, never even used lilo, but there are good points for grub:
- you can edit the boot arguments before booting, in the bootloader menu (no can do that in lilo, if you're settings are wrong you're screwed)
- no need to run anything after updating the kernel (do this with lilo and no boot)

Graphics:
- graphically speaking the basic menu looks OK in grub. I'm not sure if the versions included in DSL have the graphical enhancements, but lilo is able to load full-color 640x480 bmp's and having interactive animations (I've actually seen a fully working breakout in there

< http://www.gamers.org/~quinet/lilo/ >)
- the gfxboot modification allows for high-res jpeg's and really neat looking menu for both, have you ever booted a Suse or (k,x,)Ubuntu livecd? Their boot menus are gfxboot.
- grub has also an older mod, grub-splash, this is available in MyDSL. It can show 640x480 XPM images with 14 colors on the back. While the amount of colors limits this somewhat, it can still look good:
< http://ruslug.rutgers.edu/~mcgrof/grub-images/images/ >

32mb is quite enough, Dillo and mp3's run with 16mb

Edit: the install won't create any partitions for you, it could be potentially bad, so it only offers to format the root partition for you (that's right, it won't even format your swap partition)
You will have to create them yourself (use cfdisk, it's easy) and format the swap (mkswap /dev/hdaX)

You don't need to connect to internet on that comp to use extensions, you can just fine download them to an usb stick from the mirrors. Parted is in the Apps category.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on June 16 2008,17:49

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I forgot to mention I tried Loadlin too, it couldn't find the iso no matter what I tried.

There is no specific .iso for this because this setup doesn't need it. You might want to look at the docs in the wiki if you still want to look into this.