I realize this is really off-topic, but there are some statements being
made that are not entirely accurate.
OSR2 came out, stealthily, in October of this past year. The BIG reason it
was not made available to the public at large is simply because if you
install it on your existing system, as most people would do, you would have
to reformat your disk to take advantage of FAT32. This would be
unacceptable to most people. I cheated and got Partition Magic which lets
you resize, change file systems and otherwise change partitions without
having to reload. A bit like Adager and IMAGE.
Now, before you ask, why did Microsoft not include a partition
magic-equivalent with OSR2? Probably for the same reasons HP did not
include an Adager-equivalent with IMAGE. No one really knows, but it gives
third parties a great opportunity. CVT.EXE is a one-way conversion program
from FAT16 to FAT32 which will be available with Memphis (Win98).
Something like moving from IMAGE to TurboIMAGE, it only goes one way.
Now, you can indeed format a disk drive smaller than 512MB into FAT32.
There is an undocumented switch with the FDISK utility. FDISK will
happily format any disk greater than 512MB as FAT32, provided you enable
the "large disk support". You have to do something to enable FAT32, it is
not on by default.
Also be aware that if you install OSR2 on a machine that did not ship with
it, you may be invalidating your warranty. Be careful. Lastly, even
machines that have shipped with OSR2, do not seem to have FAT32 enabled, at
least in my experience. That is why Partition Magic is so useful.
Kind regards,
Denys. . .
Denys Beauchemin
Hicomp America, Inc.
[log in to unmask] www.hicomp.com
(800) 323-8863 (281) 288-7438 fax: (281) 355-6879
-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Geiser [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, July 12, 1997 3:48 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: OEMSR2 (was Off Topic: Win95...)
On Saturday, July 12, 1997 9:17 AM, James B. Byrne
[SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
>
> And, before all Win95 users rush out to get SR2 be advised:
>
> 1. It will not run on older PC's, which is why it is an OEM SR
only.
Actually, it will run on *some* of the older systems. The benchmark
here is that if the system was less than 12 months old as of January,
1997, a P90 or better, then you should not have any problems at all.
If it's an older system though, then yes - I would not try to find
it. Actually, it's not available for public download in its
entirety, but parts of it are (such as the ISDN Connection pieces)
from the MS Website.
> 2. There are significant changes to the file system which may cause
If you're talking about FAT32 - I don't think this is available on
the website (I may be wrong there, and if it is...) the utilities
will not convert any drive under 512K in total size, and will not
convert any DriveSpace compressed drive. It will also not convert
any incompatible drive. The new FDISK that came out with SR2 will
only offer to convert those drives which exceed 2GB. Since this
came out in SR2, it will be available in Memphis (and that's all to
be said on *that* subject :-)
Cheers, and have a good weekend,
Joe
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Joe Geiser
CSI Business Solutions
140 Bristol-Oxford Valley Road
Suite 102
Langhorne, PA 19047-3083, USA
Phone: +1 (215) 945-8100/Fax: +1 (215) 943-8408
E-Mail: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://www.csillc.com
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