Topic: Fdisking.

[bat69]

You don't have to have a second drive or partition, but its safer for data to be on/in its own partition, that way if you need to wipe the OS off, and I always suggest reinstalling an OS on a wiped partition/HD, your data wont be affected  

I could suggest other things that would speed up your system if you have two HDs, but I'll save that for another day

[Simon]

Actually, I probably didn't word the question very well - what I meant was, if you have a second HD, do you have to have an OS on it for it to work, or can you just use it for data storage, such as games etc, and access it from your primary Windows set up?

[Tony]

Actually, I probably didn't word the question very well - what I meant was, if you have a second HD, do you have to have an OS on it for it to work, or can you just use it for data storage, such as games etc, and access it from your primary Windows set up?

No the other HD will be a slave of the master, look you have other drives on your PC, such as the Floppy, CD-Rom's etc, all controlled by the OS on C drive, it will be just another addition.  

[Rodders]

...if you have a second HD, do you have to have an OS on it for it to work, or can you just use it for data storage, such as games etc, and access it from your primary Windows set up?

You only need an O/S on the drive from which you boot, Simon.  As long as the 2nd drive is correctly formatted, and jumpered as a slave, it will be recognised as another storage device by your O/S.

[daveeb]

simon i run my second drive purely as a data storage device, no os on it. as rodders says as long as its correctly jumpered as the slave there should be no problems.

 

[Sandra]

I think this is the definitive guide to Fdisk from the horses mouth as it were  


http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q255867#5

Would it be a good idea to add it to the Pals guide at the bottom of the main page Adept,as it seems to have quite a few people confused  

* Simon enabled url[/size]

[Simon]

Thanks for that, Sandra.  In return I've made the link work for you.  

I think I get the gist of it now.  They key seems to be getting the jumper switched correctly so drive#2 operates as a slave.

Thanks to all concerned - it's easy when you know how!  

[Lona]

I think I understand it all now. After you have partitioned your disk, I take it you manually transfer all your data you want to store onto the slave drive. Apart from saving your files onto the slave drive are there any other advantages in partitioning your disk?.

[Sandra]

I think I understand it all now. After you have partitioned your disk, I take it you manually transfer all your data you want to store onto the slave drive. Apart from saving your files onto the slave drive are there any other advantages in partitioning your disk?.

We are still not quite there Lona  
If you only have the one hard drive and you partition it with Fdisk then you lose all data on the total drive.
If you have a second hard drive installed as a slave to the master then you can transfer data from your master drive to it and then if you wipe your master drive the data on your second drive is safe.
However once you have multiple partitions ,be it on one drive or two drives, you can wipe a partition after transferring your data to another partition on any partition of any drive.
You can use a program such as Partition Magic (I think you may have that already somewhere   ) to create new partitions on a drive without losing data (I think) but not with Fdisk  

[Lona]

So what you mean is I would have to copy all my data onto cd before partitioning. Would my operating system still remain or would I have to reinstall windows?

[Sandra]

Afraid so Lona as all data including your OS would be lost when partitioning with Fdisk.The time to do it is when you need to reinstall your OS for some reason or if you add an extra hard drive to increase your capacity.
The only other way is to use something like Partition Magic to partition an existing in use drive without losing stuff but I will leave that for someone who is more conversant with it to explain that one  

[bat69]

Partition Magic is relatively straightforward to use

Which version do you have?

When you use it, and you want another partition, you simply click on the 'create partition'  bit, and follow the questions. You don't want to make the partition a bootable one, you want to make it FAT32, and you should generally pick a partition to follow (the recommended option). You then have to decide upon the size of partition you want. It will give you a size generally half of the size of the space available. You can change this by typing in the size in Mb ie. 3gig is 3000 in the box

Now this is where the previous advice comes into play.
I recommend that you have the OS and all programs in one partition.... the reason for this is that if you have to reinstall your operating system, you will have to reinstall all your programs too. So it makes sense to wipe them all from your HD and start with a nice clean surface, without any remenant files.    

This means your partition can be used purely for data etc, It does however mean you need to be careful when using applications to ensure you redirect the saved files to this new partition and not just rely upon the default locations.

If you need more assistance, just ask  

[Lona]

One question ::)Where do I get Partition Magic

[Scrumpy-Jack]

I've only ONE word to answer you're qusetion LONA  .  




SANDRA    




Cheers !




Scrumpy Jack    

[Lona]

There is just no end to this woman's expertise.
Sandra is MAGIC