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 oper ...

program for non-destructive splitting of

File Allocation Table File Allocation Table (FAT) is a file system developed for personal computers. Originally developed in 1977 for use on floppy disks, it was adapted for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by ...

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

fdisk In computing, the fdisk command-line utility provides disk-partitioning functions, preparatory to defining file systems. fdisk features in the DOS, DR FlexOS, IBM OS/2, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, and in certain ports of Free ...

, 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 or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

, licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

(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 New Technology File System (NTFS) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. It superseded File Allocation Table (FAT) as the preferred f ...

, 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 run - since 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 (the name being the conjunction of the two words PARTition and 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, cop ...

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

is a

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source 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 prop ...

-based graphical version of Parted **

QtParted QtParted is a Qt4 front-end to GNU Parted and the official KDE Partition Editor application besides KDE Partition Manager. QtParted is a program for Linux which is used for creating, destroying, resizing and managing partitions. It uses the G ...

is a Qt-based graphical version of Parted **

Parted Magic Parted Magic is a commercial Linux distribution based on Slackware that comes with disk partitioning and data recovery tools. It is sold as a Linux-based bootable disk. The distribution's nomenclature is derived from the names of the GNU Parted ...

* PartitionMagic *

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

* diskpart

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