Ease of installation?

[Taavi Burns]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 02:00:08PM -0600, Garth Meisel wrote:
> I'm doing a 98SE install for a friend on a box I'm building in between typing 
> here so I'll try and copy a CD full of data to the drive and then delete some 
> files and leave some big holes.  Then I'll NOT defrag and install SuSE9.  
> I'll let you know what happens.  

I suspect that we are far beyond the days of FIPS when one did have to
defrag first (as it would 'fake' the partition into being smaller by tweaking
some numbers and that's it).  FAT is not a compilcated filesystem and its format
is well understood.  I suspect that the SuSE installer is capable of moving any
data from the end of the disk into empty space to make space for itself.

But that's my suspicion only.  PartitionMagic definitely does this (with NTFS
too, to boot).  I've not heard any horror stories about PartitionMagic, and it's
a lot faster than a reinstall of Windows, even if it is sometimes very slow (it's
being 'safe').  Definitely backup important documents first.  In fact, go and
back up your important documents now, and regularly.  :)

-- 
taa

   Belief gets in the way of learning.
      - Robert A. Heinlein
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