Questions About Formatting Harddisk Having questions and am worried

[yordan 10]

Notice from Yordan:

The utility of partitionning

You are right, when mentionning the second part of cyborgxxi question.The first part was "how", most of us answered "Partion Magic".The second part was "Is there a utility to do it?" And my answer is "yes", of course.Now, most of us have large files (pictures, small movies, huge excel spreadsheets or powerpoint documents). Usually you work on them and then delete them.And then you have to defrag your hard drive.And running a defragmentation on an empty partition goes rather fast. Doing it on a half-full disk is very long. So, put your data on the D or E partition and do often a defrag. And, if you experience the same thing like me, lost space on an empty disk, simply format your d: disk, you will loose nothing on your system disk!Hope this helpedyordan

[Grafitti 0]

i personally never use any 3rd party partitioning software. i prefer to get another hard disk or some dvds, back up all my stuff, and reformat from the beginning. i just use the winXP cd, and do a clean install, delete all partitions, and start from scratch. i've heard from some people that partitioning with an odd number slows down the disk, but i've tried both and haven't noticed any obvious degradation in performance. Neways, i usually forma the first partition for windows, 2nd for scratch disks, 3rd and possibly 4th for programs and other stuff. it gives you the option when you boot from the cd, to create partitions, and then it will format the first one for you with whatever you want, FAT32 or NTFS. i prefer NTFS. ....to add another benfit of doing it this way, is that if you have a FAT32 system and convert it from inside windows, using the "convert (Drive letter) /fs:ntfs" command, you don't get the security features of NTFS. it has to be done from an original format. so then when you create your partitions and are ready to install windows, it will format whichever partition it is that you're installing windows to. then for the other ones, once windows is installed, you just open explorer, right click on the other partitions, and format. again, use whichever file system you're a fan of.

[yordan 10]

You do not really need a third party partitionning software.When I do a correct fresh install from scratch on a system, I only use windows, 2k or XP. You can do the same way.Choose "create a partition", choose a 10 giga or 20 giga partition for the system (I would say roughly 10% to 20% of the full disk), and install Windows on that partition. And then you use Windows to create the next patiton. No need of an external partitionning software.The additional partitionning soft is useful if you did a mistake at first install, or need to resize the initial partition.