Partitioning your Hard drive 

"Hey! Give us some privacy, huh?!!" Well, creating partitions on your hard 
drive isn't quite the same as putting partitions up in the office, but in 
some ways, it is. Partitions allow you to organize your applications and 
data in more efficient ways as well as allowing you to use the space of 
your hard drive more efficiently. 

When FAT 16 was the common file system in use and hard drives above 2 
Gigabytes started appearing, it was necessary to partition your hard drive 
because FAT16 couldn't handle a partition size above 2 Gigs. Today, with 
FAT32, NTFS and other file systems (Linux) in common use, this is no longer 
the issue. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't consider partitioning 
your hard drive. 

With FAT32 (the usual file system for Windows 98 and ME, and also supported 
by Windows 2000), the size of the cluster stays at 4kb up until 8GB. After 
that it doubles to 8kb. To illustrate why cluster size is important, let's 
consider a file of 50kb. With 4kb clusters, that file is stored on 13 
clusters, taking 52 kb of space. There is 2 kb of wasted space. With 8kb 
clusters, it is stored on 7 clusters, taking 56kb of space. There is 6 kb 
of wasted space. The smaller the clusters, the more efficient the storage 
of your files. So, a single partition 30 GB hard drive is wasting a LOT of 
space compared to that same hard drive split into four partitions. Exactly 
how much? That depends on the specifics of your individual files and 
programs. 

In addition, multiple partitions provide a number of options that can be 
very useful to anyone with a computer. You might create a "data" partition 
to maintain all the data that you create. Documents, pictures, music files, 
etc. It is far easier to backup that partition than to try and find all 
your files spread out over an entire drive from among the program files, 
etc. You also might maintain a separate partition for maintaining an image 
of your C: drive so you can restore it in case of emergency. You cannot 
make an image of the C: drive on the C: drive, so either additional 
partitions or drives are necessary. 

You may already have more than one partition. Does your system show more 
than one hard drive in My Computer? Each physical hard drive must have at 
least one partition for Windows to recognize and use it, but Windows shows 
each partition as a separate drive, so even if My Computer shows two hard 
drives, you may only have one physical hard drive. 

Windows categorizes partitions into three types. A Primary partition (one 
is necessary on any computer for booting from), Extended partitions, and 
Logical partitions (which reside within extended partitions). 

Partitioning Step-by-Step 

OK, now that we have pointed out why you might want multiple partitions, 
let's look at how to do it. If you have a new hard drive, or you want to 
start over with a fresh start, Windows provides a tool called FDisk, found 
on the Windows 98 startup disk. To use it, boot from the startup disk and 
type FDisk at the A:\> prompt. You should be prompted whether you wish to 
enable large disk support if your hard drive is larger than 2 Gigabytes. 
Answer Yes, and the next screen will show you the main FDisk menu.

Option 4 will allow you to display the partition information for the 
current disk.

Pressing Y will get you the information about the logical partitions within 
the extended partitions. 

Option is the screen to use if you need to get rid of partitions before 
starting over and repartitioning a drive. Be very cautious on this screen, 
deleting the wrong partition is not a great feeling! As you can see, you 
get numerous warnings. Still be careful!! 

Option 2 is used to simply set a partition as the "Active" partition on 
your machine (the partition that Windows boots from). The boot partition 
must be active in order to boot from it. 

Option 1 is the most important option, as it is here that we have the 
opportunity to create partitions! 

As you can see, you have the choice of entering how much space you want to 
use in Megabytes or in % of the total drive. For an extended partition, I 
recommend you use 100% unless you are keeping some free space open for an 
installation of Linux or something similar. If you need to create a primary 
DOS partition, you must do that BEFORE creating the extended partition. 

OK, my extended partition is complete. After checking drive integrity, I 
again get the opportunity to say how much space will be used for the 
logical drives within the extended partition. 

As you can see, I have chosen to use 1800 megs. After entering, I 
immediately get another screen to use the balance. 

And after entering on that one I'm done with FDisk!! Now, I must reboot and 
format the new drives. Drive letters may change. In this case, the drive 
letters will follow the letters of the drives on my primary drive. 

So much for FDisk. FDisk is a very powerful tool, but it is also a limited 
tool. It will destroy all data on a drive. There is no way of modifying 
partitions with FDisk without destroying the data on that disk. 

But there are other tools out there. One that is very well known and very 
reliable is Partition Magic. You should always backup before making any 
changes to the partitions, just in case, but Partition Magic is a terrific 
tool with which I have never had any trouble. 

Partition Magic has a graphic interface, and it supports a large number of 
file formats including Linux EXT2, NTFS, HPFS, FAT and FAT32. Note that 
Partition Magic allows you to choose to create multiple primary partitions. 
Only do so if you intend to dual boot using a third-party boot manager like 
the included Boot Magic. Don't do so if you intend to use NTldr (NT/Win2Ks 
boot manager), or LILO/Grub (Linux's). 

The toolbar icons and the drop down menus up top allow you to perform the 
actions without the wizards, in this case, resizing of an existing 
partition without losing its data: 

With the manual operations, pressing the Apply button (only appears when 
there are operations to apply) will result in the operation being done. 

You can also discard changes here, as you can see below the progress 
screen. If the operation requires changes to your boot drive, Partition 
Magic will boot to DOS to do so. As a result, Partition Magic only works in 
Win9x. Work on Win2K and ME machines must be done from a Partition Magic 
set of boot disks (made on a Win9x machine with Partition Magic 5 
installed). 

New partitions made by Partition Magic must still be formatted. You have 
the option of doing the formatting directly from Partition Magic. 

I hope this is helpful to everyone with questions about partitioning. If 
you have further questions, feel free to ask in the forum. 


http://www.PCNineOneOne.com