Hard Drive Compression or Partitioning a hard drive ?????

Don't Do it

Compression

Your hard drive may be running out of space and you have heard about compression - compressing the remaining space, or removing dead files and then doing it. You may have been told that this will double the amount of space left on the drive - and it will but at a cost.

 "Drivespace" is Microsoft's disk compression software. It is included as part of DOS 6.20 and 6.22, and Windows 95. Disk compression software compresses data on the fly when the data is to be stored on the hard drive or floppy, and expands the data as it is read off the drive. The process happens in the background, and is transparent to the user.

Compressed drives are actually one large hidden file on a "host drive". For instance, if you compress drive C, you will find a "Drive H" on your machine afterwards. This drive will appear to have no space on it, since all the space is being taken up by the hidden file (which you will not see, of course). The hidden file is in reality Drive C.

Special requirements: DriveSpace 3 -Manually recovery of corrupted DriveSpace 3 drives

Manually recover corrupted DriveSpace 3 drives. The "DriveSpace 3 Disaster Recovery Kit" is a toolkit for salvaging files and data from DriveSpace 3 CVFs (those .000 or .001 files) that have been corrupted beyond the ability of ScanDisk to repair. It is meant to assist someone who already has a good understanding of how data is stored on (ordinary, uncompressed) hard drives in manually recovering otherwise inaccessible compressed cluster data from within damaged CVFs, and then in piecing the recovered clusters back together into files. The kit contains a ReadMe file which explains how the programs work and how to use them, as well as explaining how drive data is organised within a DriveSpace 3 CVF. The programs themselves are command line utilities, and do not require Windows. Note that this kit is intended for DriveSpace 3. This is the version that shipped with Windows 95(b) OEM 2, with the Windows 95 PlusPak!, and with Windows 98. The programs have not been tested on earlier versions of DriveSpace, and probably would not work. Nevertheless, the information included in the kit may still be useful to someone attempting data recovery on an earlier-version CVF, and the programs could probably be modified appropriately with little effort Be prepared to lose:

• Performance of your entire system
• Untold trouble if you ever try to reverse the process.
• System problems caused by doublespace or other compression program (e.g. STACKER) when the compression program finds errors on the drive.

Partitioning

You can partition a drive to give the impression that you have more than one drive and may do so, so that you can store files on these pseudo drives. E.g: Partition the C Drive into 2 drives C, D.

Be prepared to lose:

• Performance of your entire system
• Untold trouble if you ever try to reverse the process.
• System problems caused by programs which don't like partitions.

The Best Solution

Buy a new, or second-hand Hard Drive and set it as another Hard Drive in your system.

e.g:

C Drive (original drive), D Drive (second-hand drive)

or

C Drive (new hard drive with Win95 system files), D Drive (original drive).

NEVER COMPRESS or PARTITION A DRIVE UNLESS YOU ARE A SKILLED WINDOWS USER and YOU ARE PREPARED FOR THE PROBLEMS THAT WILL ARISE