Q: I intend to upgrade from MS-DOS v3.3 to either DR DOS 6 or MS-DOS 5, both of which will allow me to have my 40MB hard disk configured as a single drive instead of being partitioned into twin 20MB drives. Am I right in thinking that to do this I will re-format my hard disk, and that I must first back up all the data? I dread doing this since I have almost 30MB on there.

A: First the bad news: yes, you will need to re-format your disk to take advantage of the ability to work with partitions greater than 32MB. However, backing up needn’t be as nasty a job as you think. But your question does beg another[0]: since backing up is going to be such a large job, it sounds as though you haven’t done it before.

… The most basic approach … would be to copy important data to a floppy disk, perhaps with the aid of a file compression utility such as LHA. If the worst happens, you simply reinstall applications from their original disks (or, much better still, back-ups of them) and copy your data back from floppy. [Or, you could use] a dedicated backup utility. My current favourite is Fastbak Plus (£110)[1].

32Mb ought to be enough for everyone? How did that work out – 512 byte sectors and a 16-bit index?

[0] No, it doesn’t – Ed.
[1] £210 in today’s money. For a backup program!