FIPS (First nondestructive Interactive Partition Splitter) - is an

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

program for non-destructive splitting of

File Allocation Table File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers and was the default file system for the MS-DOS and Windows 9x operating systems. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on Ha ...

(FAT) hard disk partitions. Splitting partitions is an alternative to deleting the partitions and creating new ones using software such as

fdisk fdisk is a command-line utility for disk partitioning. It has been part of DOS, DR FlexOS, IBM OS/2, and early versions of Microsoft Windows, as well as certain ports of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD and macOS for compatibilit ...

, the advantage of which is that the data is not lost. The most common use is installing multiple operating systems on a single computer. FIPS is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

, licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPL).

Limitations

FIPS only works on

primary partition Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first step of preparing a newly installed disk ...

s that are formatted using the

(FAT) filesystem. Most new machines with Windows pre-installed use

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

, 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 defragmented before FIPS is runsince FIPS does not move data, any data near the end of the partition prevents it from being resized.

Alternatives

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 GNU Parted (from '' GNU partition editor'') is a free partition editor, used for creating and deleting partitions. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising hard disk usage, copying data between hard disks, and ...

GParted GParted is a GTK front-end to GNU Parted and an official GNOME partition-editing application (alongside GNOME Disks, Disks). GParted is used for creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking, and copying Partition (computing), disk partitions a ...

is a

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary s ...

-based graphical version of Parted **

QtParted QtParted is a Qt4 front-end to GNU Parted. QtParted is a program for Linux which is used for creating, destroying, resizing and managing partitions. It uses the GNU Parted libraries and is built with the Qt4 toolkit. Like GNU Parted, it ha ...

is a Qt-based graphical version of Parted ** Parted Magic *

PartitionMagic PartitionMagic is a utility software program for hard disk drive partitioning originally made by PowerQuest, but subsequently owned by Symantec. As of December 8, 2009, the Symantec website stated that they no longer offer PartitionMagic. The ...

cfdisk cfdisk is a Linux partition editor, similar to fdisk, but with a different, curses (programming library), curses-based user interface. It is part of the util-linux package of Linux utility programs. The current cfdisk implementation utilizes th ...

diskpart In computing, diskpart is a command-line interface, command-line disk partitioning utility included in Windows 2000 and later Microsoft operating systems, replacing its predecessor, fdisk. The command is also available in ReactOS. Overview T ...

References

External links

*. * ''with still downloadable FIPS and documentation''. DOS software Free system software Free partitioning software Discontinued software {{Storage-software-stub

Limitations

Alternatives

See also

References

External links