P
Pavel
Some of you may have noticed a small partition on your hard drive, usually
7.8 megabytes that seem to serve no purpose. It may be located at the start
of the drive or the end of the drive. It does not seem worth the trouble to
actually use this since it is so small and most people leave it alone (that
is if you actually discover that you have it).
My understanding for the existence of this partition is that during creation
of your main partition, the partitioning software decided that in order to
keep it aligned to predefined number of tracks/sectors, this was a necessary
sacrifice.
I have created a valid drive on this partition but it just seemed useless
for anything but to store some odds and ends of files. Then I realized that
this is a great place to create an emergency disk that I could boot to
instead of using floppy drive, which is slow and you must always have one
ready with the right software on it.
In order to make this work, I needed a way to selectively boot to this
partition with out interfering with a normal boot to WindowsXP. This is
simple if you have access to a program which can switch active partition on
the fly. Once such program is PQMAGIC (there is a small utility called
PQBOOT included with PQMAGIC that can also do it with out the need for the
entire PQMAGIC program). I think that FDISK (from Windows 98) can also set
the Active disk. There are other programs that can do this. Regardless of
which program you will use, you will still have to have a bootable disk with
such program on it or.....you could use a boot manager. Most boot managers
need additional partition of about same size as this 7.8 so that would leave
me nothing for utilities. I found a great partition manager that does not
use any disk space called OSL2000. Since this OSL2000 can be invisible
during boot, you will never even notice that it's there until you need to
boot to another partition.
What do I use this partition for? Following is a list of the utilities I
have on it:
Bootable trimmed down version of Win98 that includes:
Oakcdrom.sys
Drvspace.bin
Command.com
Himem.com
Smartdrive.exe
Attrib.exe
Debug.exe
Edit.com
Edit.hlp
Fdisk.exe
Format.exe
Label.exe
Mem.exe
Mode.exe
More.exe
MSCDEX.exe
Scandisk.exe
Sys.com
Pqmagic 8 and PqDrive Image 2002 (only the basic files including Pqboot.exe)
folder
OSL2000 (only the DOS portion) folder
RAR 3.5 (DOS version) folder
NTFSPRO folder
Norton Commander folder
1) The Win98 is used to boot it's self and then it can be unused to perform
various functions such as create a bootable floppy, edit a simple text file
that could include INI and BAT files. NTFS partitions can be accessed using
program called NTFSDOS from SYSINTERNALS. It is free read only program. For
writing to NTFS, you will need NTFSPRO.
2) Pqmagic8 can be used to edit partitions. Some basic Drive Image
functionality is built in.
3) Drive Image is used for creating and restoring images of your system.
Some basic Pqmagic 8 functionality is built in. NTFS partition access is
built in.
4) OSL2000 is the partition boot program. A side benefit that is not
documented is that by using the uninstall portion of this utility, MBR is
restored.
5) RAR can be used to zip/unzip many types of compressed files.
6) Norton Commander. My favorite. It's a Disk Explorer with many features
built in to it that would normally be only accomplished with external
program in DOS such as text editor, Attribute changer, renamer...etc.
7.8 megabytes that seem to serve no purpose. It may be located at the start
of the drive or the end of the drive. It does not seem worth the trouble to
actually use this since it is so small and most people leave it alone (that
is if you actually discover that you have it).
My understanding for the existence of this partition is that during creation
of your main partition, the partitioning software decided that in order to
keep it aligned to predefined number of tracks/sectors, this was a necessary
sacrifice.
I have created a valid drive on this partition but it just seemed useless
for anything but to store some odds and ends of files. Then I realized that
this is a great place to create an emergency disk that I could boot to
instead of using floppy drive, which is slow and you must always have one
ready with the right software on it.
In order to make this work, I needed a way to selectively boot to this
partition with out interfering with a normal boot to WindowsXP. This is
simple if you have access to a program which can switch active partition on
the fly. Once such program is PQMAGIC (there is a small utility called
PQBOOT included with PQMAGIC that can also do it with out the need for the
entire PQMAGIC program). I think that FDISK (from Windows 98) can also set
the Active disk. There are other programs that can do this. Regardless of
which program you will use, you will still have to have a bootable disk with
such program on it or.....you could use a boot manager. Most boot managers
need additional partition of about same size as this 7.8 so that would leave
me nothing for utilities. I found a great partition manager that does not
use any disk space called OSL2000. Since this OSL2000 can be invisible
during boot, you will never even notice that it's there until you need to
boot to another partition.
What do I use this partition for? Following is a list of the utilities I
have on it:
Bootable trimmed down version of Win98 that includes:
Oakcdrom.sys
Drvspace.bin
Command.com
Himem.com
Smartdrive.exe
Attrib.exe
Debug.exe
Edit.com
Edit.hlp
Fdisk.exe
Format.exe
Label.exe
Mem.exe
Mode.exe
More.exe
MSCDEX.exe
Scandisk.exe
Sys.com
Pqmagic 8 and PqDrive Image 2002 (only the basic files including Pqboot.exe)
folder
OSL2000 (only the DOS portion) folder
RAR 3.5 (DOS version) folder
NTFSPRO folder
Norton Commander folder
1) The Win98 is used to boot it's self and then it can be unused to perform
various functions such as create a bootable floppy, edit a simple text file
that could include INI and BAT files. NTFS partitions can be accessed using
program called NTFSDOS from SYSINTERNALS. It is free read only program. For
writing to NTFS, you will need NTFSPRO.
2) Pqmagic8 can be used to edit partitions. Some basic Drive Image
functionality is built in.
3) Drive Image is used for creating and restoring images of your system.
Some basic Pqmagic 8 functionality is built in. NTFS partition access is
built in.
4) OSL2000 is the partition boot program. A side benefit that is not
documented is that by using the uninstall portion of this utility, MBR is
restored.
5) RAR can be used to zip/unzip many types of compressed files.
6) Norton Commander. My favorite. It's a Disk Explorer with many features
built in to it that would normally be only accomplished with external
program in DOS such as text editor, Attribute changer, renamer...etc.
