using a 98, 98SE or ME emergency Start up floppy disk and Microsoft's FDISK Partitioning Program.

My favorite partitioning programs are MS FDISK or Partition Magic 6.0. For reasons to partition, see partitioning using Windows 2000  here <<<<>>>>.

Before partitioning, Did you remember To Save your Mail, Bookmarks, Address book as you are going to loose all data on the hard disk drive ?

      Insert the emergency start up floppy disk in your A drive and turn your computer on , you should see the floppy drive light come on and a menu to start with or without CD rom support. Select no CD Rom support and wait some time for a final screen showing A:  .  At this prompt type   fdisk   and  press enter on the keyboard. A window will come up asking you if you want to enable large disk support, say yes ( type "y" ) and continue on ( you just selected FAT 32 support ).   Now you will see the FDISK partitioning program. If there is a fifth line you have more than one hard disk drive and may select which disk you wish to configure. Select # 4; and display your partition information. I partition my new 30 gig or larger drives as follows.     I actually include one additional partition ( like E:   3 Gigs, making my last drive I: ) for investigating the new up coming Operating Systems, like MS Whistler.

C:   Win2K         4 Gigabytes     with Windows 2000 installed on it

D:   ME                2 Gigabytes  with Windows ME installed on it 

E:   Tests            3 Gigabytes

F:    Progs #1     6-8 Gigabytes  with Primary Applications  like Office 2K, Photo Shop

G:    Progs #2     6-8 Gigabytes  with Primary Applications  like Netscape

H:   Split with  I:     for Virtual CD's        

 I:    Split with  H:   for  Virtual CD's

          In this scenario the C: is  the only primary partition, with all the other drive letters on a extended partition. If your hard disk drive just arrived brand new it will be empty, meaning no partitions displayable using #4 in FDISK.  If you have an old drive and you wish to start over. Select #3 and delete all your old partitions, starting with #3  working your way up to #1 , deleting away,  until drive is completely empty, Re-check by Selecting # 4; displaying partition information to make sure its completely empty.  

 Now with a empty drive, enter choice #1. Create  primary DOS partition.
 Enter choice #1. Primary DOS partition. Do you wish to use maximum space allocated, say N ( no ).
 Enter the size you want for your C: partition; such as 4000 Mb above, and press enter. Now press ESC.  Enter choice #1  " Create primary DOS partition or Extended partition " and next enter choice #2 " create extended DOS partition " .   Take all the space " don't change amount "( if you had a  20 gig drive this would be 16000 Mb ). Press enter then ESC.  Next page, Enter logical size you wish for D: such as 2000 Mb above. Continue along until all space is used by your new partitions.  At the top you will see your new partitions displayed.   A simpler configuration would be at least two partitions, with the second one of at least 500 Mb.  At the end Ignore “no partitions are set active, and relax, as this isn't necessary. Now press ESC  and  re-start your computer still booting the emergency start up  floppy, selecting  no  CD ROM support . When back at the A: prompt you may format your created partitions by Typing in      format@C:@/U   "enter"   ( the @ indicates a space)  and so on for all your other partition letters.  

If this hard drive isn't  your boot drive and is your second, third, etc. hard drive in your computer you must make sure there isn't any primary partition on it or it will always take over drive letter D: and bother you forever. To accomplish this  you must first save your work to another drive then delete all partitions on the drive as shown above. Now with a empty drive, enter choice # 1   " Create primary DOS partition or Extended partition " . Next enter choice #2 " create extended DOS partition ".  Take all the space " don't change amount "( if you had a  20 gig drive this would be 20000 Mb ).  Press enter . Next enter choice " create logical drives in the extended partition". Creating each logical partition until finished. These new partition letters will follow the the last letter on your boot drive and not interfere with D: on the boot drive. After rebooting you may format these new partitions from your operating system using windows explorer,  selecting FAT32.

09/18/2004 07:52 -0500