MS-DOS and Windows command line utilities modified: 27 Jun 2006

For MINIX 3 go to http://www.minix3.org. (Minix 3 released Oct 2005)

Floppy disk image tools

The FDVOL, WrtDsk or RaWrite3 programs can be used under MS-DOS to copy images to floppies.

FDVOL is the preferred utility to make Minix floppy images, WrtDsk and RaWrite3 are provided as alternates just in case. (Writing floppies raw is a tricky thing under DOS. Be sure to use high quality disks. See the page on Problems with the Vol Command and Floppy Disks for more information if you encounter problems.

Partition resizing tools for FAT systems

The FIPS utility can be used to shrink an MS-DOS partition if the disk of the machine on which you wish to install Minix contains a single MS-DOS partition that covers the entire disk, as is often the case. Note that the task of FIPS is not a trivial one, a million things could go wrong. Back up your data first!

Two versions of FIPS are available:

• The original version is FIPS 1.5. It is useful only with smaller FAT16 hard disks.
• FIPS 2.0 can handle larger FAT32 disks. A FIPS 2.0 README file provides more information.

Repartitioning NTFS file systems

The FIPS tools are not useful with NTFS, the file system introduced with Windows NT and normally used with Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems. There are several suggestions about repartitioning NTFS in the Tutorial on Disk Partitions page at the minix3.org website. Although that document was written for the benefit of people wishing to install Minix 3, it is equally applicable to Minix 2.

Files

The utilities avaialable here are in the files fdvol.exe, wrtdsk90.zip, rawrite3.zip, fips15.zip and fips20.zip together with their documentation.

There is no documentation for FDVOL, but its use is simple:

	fdvol 1440 A: ROOT USR		- Combine ROOT and USR on one floppy
	fdvol 1440 A: SYS.TAZ		- Put SYS.TAZ on several floppies
	fdvol 720 A: ROOT		- Just ROOT on one 720k floppy

See also ../CD-ROM-2.0/README.TXT and ../CD-ROM-2.0/MINIX/README.TXT for more examples.

Note: The above files are on the Minix 2.0.0 CD-ROM which is mirrored at ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/minix/CD-ROM-2.0 on the official Minix site in Amsterdam.