Your hard drive is brand new, it is
considered a "raw drive", it does not have any partitions for volumes.
The steps:
You need a
bootable disk, be it a floppy or a cd. We will go the easy route and
use the installation CD to create the OS partition, format it, and install the
OS at one time.
Steps:
Insert your Operating System
cd, I will be using XP. The system will start and OS will load to
the welcoming screen. Follow through to the point of the install directory,
there the program will tell you that you do not have any drives partitioned.
The program will take you to the partitioning menu. If you have more than one
physical drive in your system it will show them as Drive 0, Drive 1, etc. You
need to select the drive 0. next it will show you the maximum size for the
partition, I would suggest that you split the drive into more than one partition
(this will be explained later) and make the size of your OS partition (called
the system partition) a minimum of 15 gig, if you have a fairly large drive you
should give the OS as much room as you can; thirty gig for the OS is not
unreasonable for an OS now days.
After you create your system partition do not make any more partitions, I will
explain why later.
Next the program will format the system volume and load the software it needs
for the rest of the installation. Once it is compete it will restart. After
restart you will need the cd key for the OS. If you have a network and use
static IP's you will need the network parameters for your network.
After restart, complete the installation interview, go get a coke or eat lunch; it
will take almost an hour even on the fastest systems I have loaded XP on.
Installation complete and you are at the Welcome to Windows XP screen. Continue through the basic user setup, when complete you can customize your system. Change
how the background looks (did you know it takes almost 40% of the computing
power of your computer to run a pretty background?), setup the network, setup
your printer, change the screen resolution, change the default power settings (
XP knows you have a desktop computer, why does it want to power it down in 15
minutes???).
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