| The second step (or first step if
you already have a new, low level formatted drive!)
is to split your drive into logical partitions and allocate
drive letters to each partition.
This process is known as surprise,
surprise - 'Partitioning'.
The DOS program FDISK.EXE is normally used for this
operation.
FDISK will allocate either all of the physical space
or a portion of the space available on the drive and
assign a drive letter to it.
If your operating system uses an NTFS
partition (Windows NT, 2000 or XP). You can use the
'Disk Management' functions within these Operating Systems
or a third party utility such as 'Partition
Magic' to partition your drive.
You should skip straight to the last section of this
article 'Preparing An NTFS Volume'
which explains how to prepare a drive to use the NTFS
file system.
There are many reasons why you would
want to split your drive into more than one partition
and it may also be dictated by the operating system
that you want to install.
By using multiple partitions you can
separate your operating system (Drive C) from programs
(Drive D) and other data (Drive E).
Doing this can save data in the event of a failure such
as one of the partitions getting corrupted i.e. if the
Operating System crashes on drive C: then the Programs
on drive D and the data on drive E should hopefully
have survived!
FDISK Utility
FDISK.EXE is a DOS utility program
used for partitioning drives in the FAT or FAT32 file
system. It is supplied with MSDOS and Windows 9x (In
the Windows\Command folder).
The FDISK utility is used to define
and allocate space on a drive for use by an operating
system. This can be some or all of the space available
on a drive. It is also capable of deleting logical drives
and partitions. In most cases it can also remove non-DOS
partitions such as NTFS.
Caution! Caution! Caution!
Never run FDISK on a drive which contains data that
you need to keep. FDISK overwrites portions of the drive
when allocating space which may destroy any data that
is important to you.
If you do not understand how FDISK allocates, deletes,
renames and activates partitions you run the risk of
wiping out some or all of your existing drive and data
which can render your system unusable. Only use this
utility if you know what you are doing and are aware
of the consequences of your actions. Make sure you understand
the following information thoroughly before you use
FDISK.
I will explain more about the options
presented in FDISK later in this article, however if
you are comfortable with your knowledge about the different
types of partitions that you can create and how FDISK
allocates drive letters to them, you can skip straight
to the FDISK main menu section - 'Using
FDISK'. Otherwise the next page describes in detail
how FDISK allocates drives and drive leters. |
Preparing a Hard Drive