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Hi all,

I have a laptop where I have installed Windows 2000 and Fedora Core 3.
Both are booted using LILO (footnote: I had heard reports that Win2k
doesn't like booting from LILO, but after installing it -- upgrading
from Windows 98SE, actually -- it did not put its own boot loader in
the MBR, so my pre-existing LILO was left unmolested, and once I was
satisfied that everything worked fine, I decided to leave it that way).

Now, I would like to split off half a gig or so off the end of the
Windows 2000 partition, and install Windows 98SE there again -- for
those few recalcitrant DOS-era games that just plain don't work under
Win2k.
Having gone through this kind of thing before in the past, I cheerfully
ran the defragmenter to defrag the Win2k partition, in preparation for
using FIPS to chop a piece off the end (it is a FAT32 partition).
A problem arises: it looks like all the Win2k system files are near the
end of the partition -- which makes sense because it was nearly full at
the time I ran the 98SE->2000 upgrade. (There's plenty of free space
now, though.) And the defragger won't move them.

I'm thinking I could try to just turn off the "system" attribute on all
system files, say a quick prayer, and run defrag again. I guess I need
to be careful to avoid doing this to the page file, but other than
that, it seems worth a shot. The page file I'll just delete afterwards
while running from a rescue floppy.

I'm just worried that Win2k may actually remember the physical
locations of some of those files, sorta like the way LILO knows exactly
which disk sectors contain Linux kernel images... And if so, I'll end
up making the partition unbootable.

I have already made a back-up of said partition, so if I can't think of
anything clever, I'll just give it a go... But if someone has
experience with this situation and can offer advice, I'd love to hear
from you!

Thanks,

- Thomas