FIPS is a DOS

DOS

DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...

 program for non-destructive splitting of FAT

Fat

Fats consist of a wide group of compounds that are generally soluble in organic solvents and generally insoluble in water. Chemically, fats are triglycerides, triesters of glycerol and any of several fatty acids. Fats may be either solid or liquid at room temperature, depending on their structure...

 hard disk partitions.

Splitting partitions is an alternative to deleting the partitions and creating new ones using software such as fdisk

Fdisk

On personal computer operating systems, fdisk is a commonly used name for a command-line utility that provides disk partitioning functions...

, 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

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

, licensed under the GNU General Public License

GNU General Public License

The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

 (GPL).

Limitations

FIPS only works on primary partitions that are formatted using the FAT

File Allocation Table

File Allocation Table is a computer file system architecture now widely used on many computer systems and most memory cards, such as those used with digital cameras. FAT file systems are commonly found on floppy disks, flash memory cards, digital cameras, and many other portable devices because of...

 file system. Most new machines with Windows pre-installed use NTFS

NTFS

NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7....

, 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

File Allocation Table

File Allocation Table is a computer file system architecture now widely used on many computer systems and most memory cards, such as those used with digital cameras. FAT file systems are commonly found on floppy disks, flash memory cards, digital cameras, and many other portable devices because of...

. The filesystem to be shrunk must also be defragmented

Defragmentation

In the maintenance of file systems, defragmentation is a process that reduces the amount of fragmentation. It does this by physically organizing the contents of the mass storage device used to store files into the smallest number of contiguous regions . It also attempts to create larger regions of...

 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

GNU Parted

GNU Parted is a free partition editor, used for creating, destroying, resizing, checking, and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising hard disk usage, copying data between hard disks, and disk imaging...

 and PartitionMagic

PartitionMagic

PartitionMagic was a computer program for hard disk drive partitioning originally made by the PowerQuest corporation but now owned by Symantec. As of December 8, 2009, the Symantec website stated that they no longer offer Partition Magic. The program runs on Microsoft Windows operating systems...

.

See also

• fdisk
  Fdisk
  On personal computer operating systems, fdisk is a commonly used name for a command-line utility that provides disk partitioning functions...
  
  
• cfdisk
  Cfdisk
  cfdisk is a Linux partition editor, similar to fdisk, but with a different user interface . It is part of the util-linux package of Linux utility programs.Originally written in 1992, the current version is 2.12r....
  
  
• GNU Parted
  GNU Parted
  GNU Parted is a free partition editor, used for creating, destroying, resizing, checking, and copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for creating space for new operating systems, reorganising hard disk usage, copying data between hard disks, and disk imaging...
  
  
  • GParted
    GParted
    GParted is a GTK+ front-end to GNU Parted and the official GNOME Partition Editor application.It is used for creating, deleting, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the file systems on them...
    
     is a GTK+
    GTK+
    GTK+ is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU LGPL, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt.The name GTK+ originates from GTK;...
    
    -based graphical version of Parted
  • QtParted
    QtParted
    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 Qt toolkit. Like GNU Parted, it has inherent support for the resizing of NTFS partitions, using the ntfsresize utility...
    
     is a Qt
    Qt (toolkit)
    Qt is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software with a graphical user interface , and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as command-line tools and consoles for servers...
    
    -based graphical version of Parted

External links

• FIPS homepage (archived)