If you are manipulating existing FAT or NTFS partitions, it is recommended that you either use the scheme below or native Windows or DOS tools. Otherwise, it is not really necessary to partition from DOS or Windows; the Linux partitioning tools will generally do a better job. But if you have a large IDE disk, and are using neither LBA addressing, overlay drivers (sometimes provided by hard disk manufacturers), nor a new (post 1998) BIOS that supports large disk access extensions, then you must locate your Debian boot partition carefully. In this case, you will have to put the boot partition into the first 1024 cylinders of your hard drive (usually around 524 megabytes, without BIOS translation). This may require that you move an existing FAT or NTFS partition. One of the most common installations is onto a system that already contains DOS (including Windows 3.1), Win32 (such as Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP), or OS/2, and it is desired to put Debian onto the same disk without destroying the previous system. As explained in the , decreasing the size of an existing partition will almost certainly damage the data on that partition unless certain precautions are taken. The method described here, while not guaranteed to protect your data, works extremely well in practice. As a precaution, you should make a backup. Before going any further, you should have decided how you will be dividing up the disk. The method in this section will only split a partition into two pieces. One will contain the original OS and the other will be used for Debian. During the installation of Debian, you will be given the opportunity to use the Debian portion of the disk as you see fit, i.e., as swap or as a file system. The idea is to move all the data on the partition to the beginning, before changing the partition information, so that nothing will be lost. It is important that you do as little as possible between the data movement and repartitioning to minimize the chance of a file being written near the end of the partition as this will decrease the amount of space you can take from the partition. The first thing needed is a copy of fips which is available in the tools/ directory on your nearest Debian mirror. Unzip the archive and copy the files RESTORRB.EXE, FIPS.EXE and ERRORS.TXT to a bootable floppy. A bootable floppy can be created using the command sys a: under DOS. fips comes with very good documentation which you may want to read. You will definitely need to read the documentation if you use a disk compression driver or a disk manager. Create the disk and read the documentation before you defragment the disk. The next thing needed is to move all the data to the beginning of the partition. defrag, which comes standard with DOS 6.0 and later can easily do the job. See the fips documentation for a list of other software that may do the trick. Note that if you have Windows 9x, you must run defrag from there, since DOS doesn't understand VFAT, which is used to support for long filenames, used in Windows 95 and higher. After running the defragmenter (which can take a while on a large disk), reboot with the fips disk you created in the floppy drive. Simply type a:\fips and follow the directions. Note that there are many other other partition managers out there, in case fips doesn't do the trick for you. If you are partitioning for DOS drives, or changing the size of DOS partitions, using Linux tools, many people experience problems working with the resulting FAT partitions. For instance, some have reported slow performance, consistent problems with scandisk, or other weird errors in DOS or Windows. Apparently, whenever you create or resize a partition for DOS use, it's a good idea to fill the first few sectors with zeros. Do this prior to running DOS's format command, from Linux: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdXX bs=512 count=4