HD formatting utils for DOS

I've been an owner of System Commander since about 1995. It won't let you exceed problems that are built-in to DOS, but it makes life easier all around. It can resize partitions and filesystems, so you don't lose data repartitioning; it can store several DOS OSes in a single FAT16 partition (I have MSDOS 6.22, IBM DOS 2000, and Caldera 7.03 in the same FAT16 2G partition), and other neat stuff. MSDOS 6.22 boots from a single 2G or smaller primary partition 0 -- that's it, there's no way of getting around it. SCSI or IDE, doesn't matter: Must be primary partition 0, and smaller than 2 gig. Later versions are a little more flexible; I believe IBM PC DOS 2000 can boot from any primary partition, for example, but don't quote me on that. FreeDOS might be more flexible in that area as well. Now, if all you want is more drive space, just create an extended partition and create as many 2G logical drives as you like. Depending on your BIOS and drive, you may run out of drive letters before space :-) If you need partitions/drives over 2G, you'll need to run something other than FAT16 DOS. Win9x FAT32 (shows up as "MS-DOS 7", whatever that is) allows for extended partition sizes up to 127G I think, again, don't quote me on that. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/