partitioning

[Guest]

just but gateway 700se with 80 gig hard drive. once i hook up everything and turn on power, will there be a step by step instruction for me to choose to partition my drive or is there something i need to do. i want to partition in 3 sections. can someone help me please? thanks in advance.

 

[Toejam31]

You just bought the computer from someone? Or from Gateway?

Was the operating system pre-installed at the factory? If so, the drive is already partitioned and formatted.

You'll need a third-party utility to create additional partitions on the hard drive, like <A HREF="http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/" target="_new">Partition Magic 7.0</A> from PowerQuest.

If the hard drive is new, and blank, and you want to create more than one partition, you'll need to boot the system with a <A HREF="http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.bootdisk.com/original.htm" target="_new">startup disk</A>, and run <A HREF="http://members.bellatlantic.net/~mrscary/fdisk.htm" target="_new">FDISK</A>. There is no wizard that will appear to do this for you, not even if you have a hard drive with an OS already installed in the computer.

If this is a second hard drive, and you already have an operating system installed on the first, master drive, after creating the partitions, you can format them from the GUI. That's as simple as right-clicking on the drive letter, choosing to format, and selecting the file system.

Otherwise, you'll need to boot with the startup disk and use the FORMAT command to create the file system on the partitions.

<A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q255867" target="_new">How to Use the FDISK Tool and the FORMAT Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk (Q255867)</A>

Toejam31

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