Why partitioning and Formatting a hard drive is important.
A new drive is considered a raw drive, it is useless until it is prepped for use
by creating a partition and formatting that partition for use with the Operating
System you will use it with. So what operating system do you use? DOS (Disk
Operating System), Linux, Windows, Unix or one of the other flavors of operating
systems available today?
I will concentrate on DOS and Windows versions of Operating Systems.
So you have a new drive or you have a drive that you can not access for one
reason or another. You need to create a place for your data, this is called a
partition. In the old days you connected your drive to your computer then
started it with a floppy that has DOS on it. Today you can still do that or you
can connect the drive and start it with a Windows installation CD. Either way
you still have to go through the steps to create a partition on the drive. I
will assume you have the drive installed and connected to the computer
interface, be it IDE or SATA device.
DOS:
You will need to create a bootable floppy with these two files extra on the
floppy as they are not part of the normal floppy. FORMAT.COM and
FDISK.COM.
Boot the computer with the floppy, at the command prompt type in FDISK. You
will see a screen about large drives, answer yes to proceed. When the interface
opens you will see a menu.
If you have more than one drive in your computer you can select it with the
"Current" fixed disk drive:
On the menu you have four choices:
1. Create a DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information.
Use #4 to find out what type of partition
you have:
If it is any type besides DOS you will have to use Non-DOS Partition to
delete it.
You will want #1 if this is a new drive, if it is a used drive but you can
not access it select #3, if the partition is good but will not boot select #2.
Selecting #1:
Menu:
1. Create Primacy DOS Partition
2. Create Extended DOS Partition
3. Create Logical DOS Drives) in the Extended DOS Partition
Select #1
The program will verify the drive integrity (check disk)...... (may take a
while depending on the drive size)
Next you will have to answer this question:
Do you wish to use the maximum available size for a Primary DOS Partition and
make the partition active [y/n]
Here is where the rubber meets the road, do you want the whole drive as one
partition or do you want to split it, say one for the new OS you are going to
install, and the rest for data?
If yes is the answer then press enter. If no is the answer go to No.
The program will verify the drive integrity (check disk)...... (may take a
while depending on the drive size)
Partition is created.
You will get a message that the system has to be restarted before the changes
take effect
Restart, go to formatting your new partition
No: the program will check the drive integrity again, notice the line:
Total disk space is xxxxxx Mbytes (1 Mbyte = 1048576 bytes)
When it is done below this line is a new line:
Enter partition size in Mbytes or percent of disk space (%) to create a
Primary DOS Partition.....................[xxxxxxx]
Enter the amount of space, press enter.
The partition will be created, press escape to go back to the main menu.
Go to #2, you have to set the active partition if this is to be a bootable
drive.
On this page you will be able to see the boot partition, or active partition,
a list of all the partitions on the drive is at the top, type the number in the
[ ] for the drive you want to make active, should only show one drive C: 1 in
the list.
You will get a message: Partition 1 made active.
Restart, go to formatting your new partition
Step #3 Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
A menu will appear:
1. Delete Primary DOS partition
2. Delete Extended DOS Partition**
3. Delete Logical DOS Drive(s) in the Extended Partition***
4. Delete Non-DOS Partition
If the partition is listed as anything besides DOS then select #4, follow
the prompts to delete the partition.
**Extended partitions are a throw back to the old DOS days, Hard drives origanl could only have one partition, as drives became more prevalent and
larger DOS hit a 30 Meg barrier, that was the maximum size for a DOS partition.
To use the rest of the drive the DOS FDISK program was rewritten to add the
Extended Partition. This is a kludge, it allows you to create a partition in
the remaining space and then create up to four logical drives in that space. I
DO NOT recommend using extended partitions. They will corrupt over time and
then you can not remove them, a low level format is required to remove the
corrupt logical drives.
***If they are not corrupt you have to remove the
logical drives before you
can remove the Extended Partition. You have to remove them in the sequence they
were created in reverse order, if you have four logical drives you have to
remove the # 4 logical drive first, # 3 next, and so on. DO NOT
remove a drive
in the middle of the sequence, this will preclude you from removing any other
logical drives and the Extended partition itself.
Formatting a DOS Partition:
Restart the
computer, at the prompt type FORMAT C: /s then
press enter, this will format the partition and put the DOS system files on the
hard drive making it bootable.
You will see this:
WARNING, ALL DATA ON NON-REMOVABLE
DISK DRIVE C: WILL BE LOST!
Proceed with Format (Y/N)
Press y and enter, format will began.
When the drive is formatted you will see: Volume label (11 characters, ENTER
for none)?
Enter volume label if you want, finish and restart the computer.
Restart, C:\ prompt will show.
Windows
install CD:
Where to start? Put the cd in the drive......... Uh,
no... I mean why would you use the Windows NT, 2000, XP, or Vista install cd?
One reason is to remove any partitions on a drive that the OS can not, or
maybe you have a virus that a anti virus program can not see or remove because
it is in the Main Boot Record (MBR). Or maybe you have a drive that has Linux
or Mac partitions on it.
So how would you remove a partition?
Start your computer with the install CD, at the Welcome to Setup screen
press enter (you aren't going to complete the setup just do a couple of tasks
in the setup program).
Accept the licensing agreement, press F8
The next
screen is the one you want to work from. "The following list shows the existing
partitions..."
Inside the box you have either some partitions or the drive
will show as unpattitioned space.
To remove just one partition, highlight that partition and press the "
D=Delete Partition". You will have to follow the prompts to delete the
partition, this gives you a second chance just in case you DO NOT want to
delete the partition. If you want to delete the partition press "L". To remove
all the partitions, repeat the procedure until you have a unpattitioned drive.
To create a partition press "C=Create Partition". The next screen will allow
you to change the size of the partition, you can select the complete drive or
section out the drive into smaller partitions. The reason for making a smaller
partition at the beginning of the drive is for the Operating System. I
recommend that you use 15-20 gig of the drive as the OS partition and the rest
for data*.
If you
use all of the drive to install the OS you will not have a separate partition
for your data, you should always keep your OS and data separate, most programs
will allow you to pick where you install them and where the saved data files
are located, always use a separate partition for your data files.
If you
create an image of your OS partition you can store it on the data partition
until you have it written to a CD/DVD or move it to external storage.
