One of the most common installations is onto a system that already
contains DOS (including Windows 3.1), Win32 (such as Windows 95, 98,
NT), or OS/2 and it is desired to put Debian onto the same disk
without destroying the previous system. As explained in section
2.3.1 on page [*], 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
divide up the disk. The method in this section will only split a
partition into two pieces. One will contain the original operating
system, 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
filesystem.
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 you need is a copy of FIPS, which is available in
the tools directory on your Debian CD-ROM. This disk must be
bootable. Under DOS, a bootable floppy can be created using the
command sys a: for a previously formatted floppy or format a: /s for
an unformatted floppy. Unzip the archive and copy the files
RESTORRB.EXE, FIPS.EXE and ERRORS.TXT to the bootable floppy. FIPS
comes with very good documentation that you may want to read. You
should definitely read the documentation if you use a disk
compression driver or a disk manager. Create the disk and read the
documentation _before_ you continue.
The next thing to be done 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 also work. Note that if you have Windows
95 or higher, you must run DEFRAG from there, because DOS doesn’t
understand VFAT, which is used to support long filenames in Windows
95 and higher.
After running the defragmenter (which can take a while on a large
disk), reboot with the FIPS floppy disk you created. Simply type a:\
fips and follow the directions.
Note that there are many other other partition managers out there,
in case FIPS doesn’t work for you.