From: asb@cs.nott.ac.uk (Andrew Brown) Subject: A way around repartitioning ? Date: 24 Nov 1992 11:28:01 GMT
Last night I had a thought, surely there must be many other linux users in
the same situation as me. I have one 210Mb HDD partitioned for 150Mb DOS and
50Mb linux back in the days of v0.12 when I just thought "I'll give it a go".
Now I've filled my linux partition, and cannot expand it because I simply do
not have enough floppies to back up everything, even just the essentials. So
I thought of the following idea:
1. Write a DOS (or even linux ?) utility that creates a large file in
a DOS partition that *must* consist of contiguous clusters. This has
the effect of 'reserving' space in the DOS partition.
2. Add options to mkfs and mount so that the space within the file can
be used as a normal linux filesystem.
Using this idea would mean that we could create new file systems by simply
writing a new special file and then mounting it. If this is possible then it
solves the repartitioning headache in a stroke. If not, perhaps someone would
like to explain why it cannot be done.
Anyway, I hope I've set some peoples minds working.
Regards,
-Andy (asb@cs.nott.ac.uk)