Old lap top can I.....

[simpatico]

I bought a old laptop, it's a AST- Advantage NB-SX25 at a good will store, and it is configured to dos 6.something. I'm not good with DOS system files,but I've checked the drive size and it says, total c: 104.456.192 bytes, and free space is 47.570.944 bytes, (45% free) but here is the mystery for me! In the drive info there is also a drive letter H: and it contains 63.570.536 bytes, and 2.590.720 4% used. is this a second hard drive or a partition! Well what I want to do, is to install win 3.1 cause it's all I own beside the win 95 in 16 in floppy media, I like to install a win version with a GUI format , so that I can give to a poor writer friend of mine, question #1:Can it be done? and #2 how do I do it (if it is possible) I'll need a step by step tutoring please. Thanks a billion!!!!

[Eeyore]

The drive letter H would indicate that you have a compressed C drive. At the prompt type:
DIR H:\*.* /a

You will probably find:
DBLSPACE.BIN
DBLSPACE.INI
DBLSPACE.000
IO.SYS
MSDOS.SYS

If the version is DOS 6.22, they will be:
DRVSPACE.BIN
DRVSPACE.INI
NOTE: If you are runing DRVSPACE substitute that for all DBLSPACE referenced here.

type:
dblspace /list
this should tell you about what type of drives are found.

type:
CHKDSK C:
CHKDSK H:
will tell you the total capacity of the drives. Keep in mind that you probably only have one drive H. C drive is actually a file dblspace.000 which is on H drive.

With the small amount of space, Windows 95 probably won't be practical. Windows 3.1 may already be installed.

See Windows 3.1/3.11 Installation for how to do that. If there is a version of windows there, you might want to try to get it running instead. Do not format unless you want tostart from scratch, as you already have an operating system installed.

Because of the limited space, I would keep the compressed drive as it is. You can install Windows 95 on a compressed drive. But the installation requires extra space.

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Dennis
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[tiberiuscan]

My IBM laptop is the same. What you have is a compressed drive.
As eeyore pointed out depending on the version of DOS that was used, doublespace or drivespace was used to increase the amount of available space on a relatively small hard drive.