Brian D. Carlstrom writes:

 > some winux leenie wrote a dos program to split an existing dos partition
 > into two parts w/o haveing to lose the existing data. 
 > 
 > anyone know the name of the program or a pointer to it? i looked around
 > the typical linux sites and came up with nothing

it's called "FIPS", but sorry, I've never needed it, so I don't know
where it's kept.  You also need one of those DOS defragmenter programs
to move all your data to the beginning of the partition first.

 > a friend of mine just got a new box with a one gig disk, and the company
 > did her the favor of preinstalling everything on one big partition.

A 1-gig disk as as a single FAT filesystem? *ouch*! That's using 32k
allocation units, 16k if the disk is slightly under 1G.  Splitting the
partitions won't change this, you will need to remake the filesystems.

Which brings me to the next point, a MOST IMPORTANT point.  Neither
FIPS nor the NetBSD install are "safe" operations, certainly at least
NetBSD has big warnings about making sure you have valid backups of
any data on the disk, and I would hope FIPS does also.  You imply that
you don't have release media to reinstall the DOS software, and that
therefore you want a safe alternative. FIPS is a shortcut to save you
time reinstalling/restoring, not an alternative to taking backups. You
need to hassle your vendor for release media, or find a backup tape
unit. Otherwise your friend may not be so friendly anymore.

--
Dan.