On 2017-03-04 13:17, Dave Plater wrote:
On 01/03/2017 17:40, Christopher Myers wrote:
but I suspect that all OSes put something at the end of a partition instead of just from the front forward so only copying the front will lose the back and render the image useless. Or do I have that wrong? Once your dos based fat16 disk is defragmented you will only have data at the back of the disk, all the executable's data is moved to the front of the data area.
Some MsDos utilities do write things to the very last record. I remember a PCTools or Norton utility that saved a copy of the FAT and root directory to the end of the disk. It could help on some recovery ops. However, nothing really broke if these files were lost: just create them again as usual (typically done by autoexec or a halt script). The system itself saved nothing specifically to the end of the disk.
The disk is in this order first partition table then mbr the FAT (File alocation tables) then directories and file names then last of all the actual file data, which the defragmenter loads the important executable files first. The outermost data is generally text and such like. If you had the old dos norton disk doctor utilities, I found them on some mirror about a year and a half ago, you could first defrag the disk and manually shrink the partition using norton diskedit via rewriting the mbr and partition table. I used to do it all the time once when the world was young. If I remember where the mirror was I'll post it. Best regards Dave P
A good tool to shrink partitions was Partition Magic. There is a CD or DVD going around that has a surprising collection of recovery tools for msdos/win. Not very legal, though. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" (Minas Tirith))