Partitioning Drive

OmegaRed

I just formatted my hard drive to clean a load of crap off it. All along I had 2 partitions, of a C drive and an F drive but forgot to partition it again while setting it up. Is there anyway of partitioning it within windows?

I was told you could do it by going to Start>control panel>Admin Tools>Computer management>Storage>Disk Management

But where do I go from there???

smeggle

don't you mean c and d drives? Anyway - don't think you can do it the way you mentioned. Just looked in there and I can't see any option either.

Apart from partition magic only way is to re-format/f-disk

mukki

formatting the drives wont affect partitions sizes


if your 2 partitions have been combined into 1 then you need to either
leave it as one big drive- like everyone else has
or buy partiton magic,
or download a PM free immatation

it can be called c and e, if the e drive was added after the cdrom, or all drives (except the system drive) can have their letter changed in the disk manager

djmarkus

Ranish Partition manager(Free) would do but it would be under "Advanced"

Mukki: i always partition my hard drives into 40gb chunks

mukki

sorry for the paritioning remark- ever man for themselves,

if you have nothing important on the drive, then just use old fdisk, when it asks the size, say 50% (80gig drive i guess) and apply all that

then install windows (with a full ntfs format for xp or 2k) and when windows is installed use your Start>control panel>Admin Tools>Computer management>Storage>Disk Management and create and format the second partiton

and then go to bed and get some sleep

smeggle

OmegaRed wrote:

I just formatted my hard drive to clean a load of crap off it. All along I had 2 partitions, of a C drive and an F drive but forgot to partition it again while setting it up. Is there anyway of partitioning it within windows?

I was told you could do it by going to Start>control panel>Admin Tools>Computer management>Storage>Disk Management

But where do I go from there???

hmm just an after thought on this one. Your second partition should still be there. I take it you formatted c:? If so the other partition won't have been affected and will have remained as it was prior to formatting. If it's not showing - just goto disk manager and remount it.

Even if you set c: to use all available disk space it will only use 100% of what you had previously set the c: drive at, so;

If you had an 80gig drive and had previously had that drive split 50/50 - then your c: drive was 50% of the original size or when formatted and set to use all available space on c: you would be using 100% of 50% of the drive.

The second partition remains intact and should just show up on re-install of your os. If it doesn't just remount via your disk manager as I said.

Technically allthough you have one drive physically, you create two seperate drives by partitioning. To format a partitioned drive correctly you would need to use the command 'FORMAT/ then the drive letter of each drive you wish to format respectfully. So, format c:, format d:. format e: etc etc and so on untill each individual drive is formatted. Simply formatting c: will not destroy the other partitions in any way.

A lot of people use the ntfs format utility of xp. I personally have never favoured this method and in most cases have found stabability issues later during use. This is why I keep recommending that people use the older fdisk/format c:/s method as used with windows 98. Allthough it re-formats the drive to fat 32 (xp can use either file system btw), it's a simple case of then reformating as an ntfs format via the xp disc.

I know other engineers say that does not make a difference but when I've tested two exactly the same computers formatted and set up by each method, I've found that the computer that has been fdisked/formatted c:/s computer to be far more stable than the direct ntfs format from xp disc.

Of note to folk who still use windows 98 (I still do btw) I allways advice that proceedure and stress the importance of using the command 'FORMAT C:/s'. the forward slash/s being the vitally important bit to system stabability. Most folk only use the straight format c: command,, which whilst it does work, is wrong and does affect the stability of the newly installed OS. Depends how many blue screens you like seeing! I don't and never have issues with 98 IF I format in the way I've recommended.