# Vault 7: Projects

This publication series is about specific projects related to the Vault 7 main publication.

### Dark Matter

# FDOS_1_0_FINAL_freedos_setup_odin_fips

11 May, 1998

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is suitable for this purpose. Other suitable programs are Norton Speedisk
PCTools' Compress, DISKOPT in Novell DOS 7, or the shareware programs ORG,
DOG or SAFPAK (available by anonymous FTP from any SimTel mirror in the
diskutil directory). I did not test these however, so don't blame me if they
don't work for you.
You may also want to use a program like Norton Disk Doctor (or 'scandisk'
in DOS 6.*/Windows 95) to check your harddisk before and after using FIPS.
FIPS was developed under DOS 5.0. It should work fine with anything above
3.0, perhaps even with 2.0. However it will not be of much use with older
DOS versions, since the large partition sizes are only available since DOS 4.
It has been reported to work with DOS 6.0 and 6.2 and Novell DOS 7. I have
also received reports about successful use with Windows 95 partitions. Note
that the long filenames are no problem for FIPS, because it works on a
lower level where directory structure is of no concern. It is probably
sensible to boot from a DOS disk before using FIPS in such a setup (see 6.)
1. Introduction
The program was inspired by the Linux Project. When installing Linux on a
PC that was used for DOS / Windows, many people want to retain a smaller
partition for their DOS software. However, since most Harddisks contain
only one large partition, you would normally be required to do a complete
backup, erase the partition and build two (or more) new partitions. Then you
would restore the backup to one of the new partitions. On today's systems
with hard disk capacities of usually 500MB or more, a complete backup becomes
practically infeasible without large media like streamer tapes once the
drive has filled up to some considerable fraction. Even though many people
backup their most valuable date (a practice which I would highly recommend
in any case), the process of reinstalling all the software packages takes
many hours or even days.
FIPS was written to remedy this problem. You can now split a partition
without losing any data, provided there is enough free space for the new
partition at the end of the old one.
2. What FIPS does
FIPS reduces the size of a partition by changing some values in the
partition table and boot sector. It does not change the formatting of
the partition, especially not the cluster size and the size of the file
allocation table (FAT). Therefore the reduced partition will have a FAT
that is in part unused, but this is not a problem for DOS.
From the free space that is won by this, FIPS creates a new _primary_ DOS
partition.
If you want to use the new partition under a different OS (e.g. Linux), use
its supplied fdisk program to make any necessary changes (refer to the OS
manuals).
If you want to use the new partition under DOS/Windows, you can use it as
it is (after formatting!), but be aware of the following:

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