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?

...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.

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  

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?.

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?

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  

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




SANDRA    




Cheers !




Scrumpy Jack