Getting Stacker to Work?

[Harry Potter]

Hi! I have Win98SE installed on a mini-tower with a 2.1 Gig hard drive and have been trying to compress data on my hard drive. I understand that there are no disk compression utiities to work on FAT32 hard drives, and I'm unwilling to downgrade to FAT16. I've been trying to use Stacker--which I found on the internet--to compress a Win98-based RAM drive and put temporary information there. Now, I can compress a RAM drive from DOS, but when I do so and then start Windows, I lose all long filenames. The version of Stacker I have wasn't packaged for install from floppy, so I had to install it manually. My setup didn't preserve the original drive settings, in which case I want drive A: to be the floppy, C: the hard drive, D: the (broken) CD-ROM drive, E: the RAM drive and F: the compressed RAM drive. Unfortunately, the Setup program doesn't work, and I have not been able to keep this organization. When I try to compress the RAM drive from Windows, I get no response from the toolbox. So, I was forced to use DriveSpace 3, which hurts one of the purposes of the computer: to act as a networked hard drive for a DOS-based latop without a hard drive. I am sorry about the long post. Any help would be arppreciated.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

You can not use Stacker with Windows 98. If you want to use disk compression you must use Drivespace.

 

[Harry Potter]

Thank you.

 

[Harry Potter]

BTW, can I run DriveSpace 3.0 for Windows and access its services from the MS-DOS command-prompt? I am networking the Win98 PC with a DOS laptop to act as a hard drive and, as the Win98 PC has a very small hard drive, I've been creating a very large RAM drive, compressing it and extracting the contents of a RAR file onto it. I think the answer is no, but I ask just in case. I can still use Stacker on the RAM drive, though.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Why do things the hard (and very unstable) way? Just install a larger hard drive. 3 or 4 Gigs should do it. Compression was only usefull when hard drive space was extremely limited and large hard drives were very expensive. This is not the case today.

 

[Harry Potter]

That's true. Unfortunately, that kills one of my dreams. The ain reason I like compression is the numbers.