In the meantime, I actually worked out a crummy, lowtech solution to the problem. I happened to have an old version of a Windows disk tool called NUTS AND BOLTS by McAffee. If you go into the disk defragmenting section of this toolset, it shows a detailed display of what is in all of the blocks on the disk when you move the mouse over the graphical display which is REALLY NEAT ( unlike the rest of the package .).
I discovered that the last block of the disk was filled with files from my Notron Utilities Version 3.07. The offending files were all from the LIVEUPDATE directory. Eurrggh ! (I removed them by deleting the whole directory- who needs updates !!!???). Then FIPS worked fine. Of course, for the price of the Nuts and Bolts software, I'm sure you could buy a newbie-friendly disk partitioning package like partition magic. I'd still love to know how to read FATs from DOS............ David Wright wrote: > Quoting SDI " Semiconductor Instruments\ ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > > > So I duely ran noton and defragged, which put all the stuff in the first > > 10% of the disk. > > But, looking on the map , the last sector had hidden files on it. > > So I turned on visualization in Win 98ofhidden file types.and system > > files- a total of 7 megs ! > > > > I realize that I can change all the file attributes somehow (I've yet to > > find the command under dos ), and then re-defrag , then re-attribute the > > files asa before. > > > > But it strikes me the more intelligent way to do things would be to > > discover from the fat or somehow else the ids of the files in the last > > sector. > > > > Is there no way of doing this ?? > > How can you read the fat ? > > When I did this for my first Debian system on a W95 computer, > I just used the ATTRIB *.* command to find the names of the files > that were RSH. Then I did ATTRIB -r -s -h FILENAME and copied > them, deleted the original, renamed the copy and put +r +s +h back. > (The copies landed just after the freshly defragged files.) > > I think I checked that I hit the right files by just trying FIPS until > it didn't complain. There were very few of them. > > BTW I had probably turned off any swapfile before I started. I would > imagine that moving an active swapfile would be very dangerous as this > is one case where absolute disk addresses are likely to be used. > (LILO's /boot is another.) > > Cheers, > > -- > Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151 > Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA > Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify > official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised.
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