Preparing a Hard Drive

Introduction

This guide explains how to prepare a hard drive when setting up a new drive, partitioning an existing drive or preparing for a new operating system.
Some of the processes are quite involved and need an understanding about the utilities necessary to complete the various tasks.
If you need a thorough guide to all of the processes contained in this article we recommend you purchase one of our recommended books at the Tech Book Shop.

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What you will need

• Low Level Format utility program - Supplied by the manufacturer of the drive. There are third party suppliers of generic utility programs for this purpose, however you should be absolutely certain that the utility supports your drive or you could render it useless!
  Caution! - Most manufacturers recommend that you should never low-level format a drive!
• DOS boot disk or equivalent - this will be used to access the formatting utilities such as FDISK and FORMAT when preparing the new drive.
• Operating system install disks or CD Rom.
• Drive formatting utilities such as FDISK, FORMAT (DOS) or third party utility such as 'Partition Magic'.