DriveSpace
Sign in to saveAlso known as DoubleSpace, DRVSPACE.BIN, DBLSPACE.BIN
Described at
What is DoubleSpace and How Does It Work? | Microsoft Learn
msdn.microsoft.com →Link to a page describing this subject · 40,000 chars · not written by Vinony
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Encyclopedic overview
15 sectionsContents
- Overview
- {{anchor|DoubleGuard}}Bugs and data loss
- Add-ons
- Later versions
- MS-DOS 6.2
- MS-DOS 6.21
- MS-DOS 6.22
- {{Anchor|3}}DriveSpace in Windows 95
- DriveSpace in Windows 98
- DriveSpace in Windows Me
- {{anchor|DMSDOS}}Support outside Microsoft
- See also
- References
- Further reading
- External links
DriveSpace (initially known as DoubleSpace) is a disk compression utility supplied with MS-DOS starting from version 6.0 in 1993 and ending in 2000 with the release of Windows Me. The purpose of DriveSpace is to increase the amount of data the user could store on disks by transparently compressing and decompressing data on-the-fly. It is primarily intended for use with hard drives, but use for floppy disks is also supported. This feature was removed in Windows XP.
== Overview == thumb|Microsoft advertised DoubleSpace on the cover of MS-DOS 6 distributions (user's guide for MS-DOS 6 with [[Windows 3.1 pack-in pictured, DoubleSpace sticker top-right)]] In the most common usage scenario, the user would have one hard drive in the computer, with all the space allocated to one partition (usually as drive C:). The software would compress the entire partition contents into one large file in the root directory. On booting the system, the driver would allocate this large file as drive C:, enabling files to be accessed as normal.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “DriveSpace” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.