DISKLESS ANGEL Client Configurator Tools – Partition Editor

7.1

Partition Editor can be used to create, activate or delete FAT16/32 disk partitions and DISKLESS ANGEL VFS partitions on hard disks under Windows 9X. VFS partitions so created can be used to store DISKLESS ANGEL Client or any other file images. VFS partitions can be mounted up as normal hard disk drive or loaded into ram as ramdisk drive by WDDOS.EXE.

7.2

The following is a screenshot of the computer used for composing this documentation. The computer has only one hard disk with four partitions already created, including the First [drive C] FAT16, the Third [drive D] and the Fourth [drive E] FAT32 partitions as well as a Second [drive G] NTFS partition.

The Second NTFS partition is mounted last as drive G under Win98 here with the use of the readonly NTFS for Windows 9X driver offered by Sysinternals and available at http://www.sysinternals.com.

7.3

After plugging in a hot-pluggable USB-IDE hard disk, a new drive H: is seen:

The hard disk HDrv 81 is the newly hot-plugged hard disk of about 1 gigabytes in size, which has two partitions already created; [ad1s1]* is a normal FAT16 partition of about 157Mb and [ad1s2] is a VFS partition of about 1051Mb. The * represents that the partition is set Active.

By selecting the VFS partition [ad1s2], one can see:

As shown above, this VFS contains another sub-partition of FAT16 filesystem of about 415Mb and a remaining free space of about 636Mb.

7.4

So let us use the Image Copier, which will be introduced in greater detail in the next chapter, to copy a partition image file with DISKLESS ANGEL Client onto the frees pace of this VFS partition. By clicking the Image Copier under Tools Menu:

By clicking the button next to the input box:

By clicking the Browse button next to the Local File box:

The DISKLESS ANGEL Client, a system image of Win98 with Litestep as the desktop manager, found in the default \WDDIR directory can be selected as shown.

Go back to the main form of DISKLESS ANGEL Client Configurator and Open the Global Options Setter to ensure that the newly inserted hard disk, here Disk 1, is checked.

The above screenshot shows that in addition to the original internal hard disk 0, the newly inserted USB-IDE hard disk appears as disk 1. To re-open the Image Copier and do the previous steps to select the partition image file, LITESTEP.IMG and click the Open File button:

Click the OK button:

and click the button next to the Output box and select the Local Disk radio button and click the pull-down button to select [auto]:

Then press the OK button:

By pressing the Copy button, the copying process starts and after a while the copying process finishes and it returns to the main form. And one can re-open the Partition Editor and select the VFS partition as follows:

It can be seen that a new VFS sub-partition [ad1s2b] of FAT16 is created with a size of about 415Mb. It has a label: NONAME. Let us change it to LITESTEP for identification purpose. First select the [ad1s2b] partition:

And in the Partition Label box, change NONAME into LS and press the Set Label button:

The VFS sub-partition [ad1s2b] label is re-set as LS. The VFS sub-partition label can be at most 6 letters long.

7.5

Let us create a new VFS sub-partition with all the remaining 221Mb of the VFS partition by selecting [ad1s2] and the free space within:

and press the Create button on the DISKLESS ANGEL Partition panel:

By default, all the size of all the free space is listed in the Total Size box. Accept it and select FAT32 as the filesystem used and c as the drive unit and press OK button here:

Since drive unit a and b have been used in [ad1s2a] and [ad1s2b]. The available drive unit letters remain from c to p. That means a VFS partition can have sub-partitions a to p; a total of 16 drive units or sub-partitions for each VFS partition.