FIPS (computer program): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:33, 15 September 2007

Revision as of 23:19, 5 April 2008

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'''FIPS''' (Fully Interactive Partition Splitter) is a [[DOS]] program for non-destructive splitting of [[FAT]] harddisk partitions. [[hard disk]] [[Partition (computing)|partitions]].

Splitting partitions is an alternative to deleting the partitions and creating new ones using software such as [[fdisk]], the advantage of which is that the data is not lost. The most common use is installing multiple operating systems on a single computer.

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== Limitations ==

FIPS only works on [[primary partitionspartition]]s that are formatted using the [[File Allocation Table|FAT]] file system. Most new machines with Windows pre-installed use [[NTFS]], leaving FIPS obsolete for its intended purpose of resizing existing Windows installations to install Linux. In addition, FIPS cannot grow partitions due to technical limitations with the design, and partitions shrunk with it have some wasted space since it does not shrink the [[File Allocation Table]]. The filesystem to be shrunk must also be [[Defragmentation|defragmented]] before FIPS is run - since FIPS does not move data, any data near the end of the partition prevents it from being resized.

These limitations have caused it to be largely superseded by more modern tools with better filesystem support, more advanced resizing methods and more complete partitioning functionality, such as [[GNU Parted]] and [[PartitionMagic]]