Harry,

The way I understand it, Partitioning should take place before installing
the OS. That means, in my case it's already too late, since just about all
my programs are installed.

It's just the ideal situation. The more disk space is in use, the longer the
process will take. Before installation there's effectively none in use and
partitioning is almost instant. After OS installation but before much else
the process will take longer. But Win ME doesn't take much space by itself -
c. 300M - so it's not too painful.

Once you're getting to, say, the 1G + mark, it's likely to get
frustratingly-long. But it will depend on CPU/RAM/HD speed too. This kind of
operation is notably faster on the 2.6GHz DDR RAM laptop I have here than on
the 850 MHz SDRAM desktop.

As for data loss, I have partitioned many, many times and only ever had one
failure - when I cancelled on realising an operation would take many hours
and lost the contents of one partition (but most of which was duplicated
elsewhere and none of which was irreplaceable).

But, if you have an uninterruptible power supply or live in an area where
you're confident there won't be any outages.........well,
personally-speaking, I'd set the operation in motion and go do something
else and come back later to see if it's finished.

Then why do they tell you partitioning without data loss?

That's probably how it will be. But zero data loss is not something that can
be guaranteed. Power cuts, lightning strikes, hard drive failure,
particularly-nasty viruses.

The important thing to do is back up irreplaceable data - burn it to cdr or
whatever. Backups are essential, whatever operation you run. If you have
data you can't afford to (or would really prefer not to) lose. But this is
why you're considering partitioning in the first place isn't it?

Reading that claim motivated me to persue this avenue.
The way you and Ron describe it, provokes me to loose interest. I am not
too
familiar with the dos commands.

You don't need a knowledge of DOS commands to run either PM from the rescue
disk set or BING. They boot to the program and it's a point-and-click
interface from there. Your mouse - assuming it's PS2 - will work. While if
you were using the Windows version of Partition Magic you'd execute it from
within Windows and it would reboot and run in DOS with no need for user
input.

Would it be advantageous for me to learn some of them?

Practically there's little point. *If* and when you need to learn any, your
best bet would probably be to ask, eg here, at that time.


Shane