Now I get to tell you why you don't want the setup program to create more than
one partition:
When you create
partitions from the setup program, you are
really in DOS, not a 32 bit OS (like NT or 2000, or XP). DOS can only create one
primary partition, any other partitions are called extended partitions. The
drawback on using extended partitions is that you can only have one, and you can
only have four volumes. Lets say you have a 250 gig hard drive, your OS is the
primary partition, you set it for 30 gig, this leaves you with 220 gig of open
space, now a lot of stuff can get lost in that much space (really - think about
it..........) so you say how would I organize that much space? Break it down
into smaller chunks. You use the
storage manager to create partitions and
volumes.
Using system manager go to disk management. You will see two drives - your OS
drive and your CD/DVD (unless you put in another drive that has already been partitioned and formatted).
You will also see a block, it will have a label on it that indicates it has not
been partitioned. You can partition it as one drive or you can make a bunch of
smaller drives. You should consider how you want to organize your data.
With a 220 GB drive I would divide it up into three smaller partitions,
two
eighty and one sixty gig partition. One for media (video clips and dvd's eat a
lot of space), one for your personal data like finical and documents, and the
last can be miscellaneous stuff.
If you right click on the white space of the drive you will get a small menu,
you select create a partition, select Primary for all partitions, do not fall
into the extended partition trap. ( if you go with extended and add another hard
drive to your system at a later date you may not have any volumes open to add
the drive to the OS!)
After you set the size of the partition, then the drive letter, a format menu
will open, you can take the standard format or quick format. The standard format
will take some time, fifteen minutes to hours depending on the size of the
partition, I use the quick format most of the time unless I have a drive that
has had problems in the past. Be sure to run the utility to check the drive
for errors, it is located under the properties on the tools tab, it will be
faster now than later with a lot of data on the volume.
Once the format is complete you are ready to use the drive, for any more open
space just repeat the above steps for each partition you want to create. (Don't
forget to run the Defragmenter once a month to keep your drive at optimum
operating speed!)
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