> I have found that with Partition Magic I can make another partition
  on my drive, either for DOS or for Linux, without having to re-format
  the whole thing and erase all the data that is already on it.  I can't
  do that with DOS FDISK.  I never tried FDISK for Linux.  I'm still to
  much of a newbie to dare.  You know what often happens when you try to
  do something when you don't really understand what you are doing.  I'm
  sure you have had experiences like that : (((

> There might be other products out there that work just as well or even
  better than Partition Magic, but the word just hasn't gotten out, and
  people are afraid to try something they never heard of.   You know what
  often happens when you dare to go where no man has ever gone before.
  I'm sure you have had experiences like that : (((

> This reminds me of the old joke about the party of hunters who
  were gathered around the campfire while each in turn related to the
  others the story about his second most painful experience : ((((((

> Sam Heywood

When Partition Magic reduces the size of a big FAT16 partition, only a small
percentage occupied, from 2 GB to 255 MB, would the allocation unit be reduced
from 32768 bytes to 4096 bytes?

DOS FDISK and Linux fdisk or cfdisk does not move or preserve data.  There is
FIPS, which runs under DOS, and also a Linux-based partition resizer that is
supposed to preserve data.

I shortened a 2 GB FAT16 partition to 254 MB using Linux cfdisk after backing up
to a Linux partition, and to my surprise, the data survives, though the
allocaton unit is still 32768 bytes.  Idea is to keep big downloads on a Linux
partition.  I still need to reformat that reduced FAT16 partition to bring down
the allocation unit to 4096 bytes, and copy back some of the data.

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