Help: Installing A New Master Hard Drive For Xp.
StormLiong
Join Date: 2002-12-27 Member: 11569Members
Join Date: 2002-12-27 Member: 11569Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Just got a brand spanking new HD</div> I was wondering if anyone could help/point me out on how do I prepare a new master hard drive that is ready to install XP. I had just got a new Maxtor 120GB ATA133 HD and I plan to use it as the new master drive. I;ve made the appropiate backups of data on CDs. So all I need now is to get the OS installed.
I have read through some sites but most of them say I need a system disk. I assume this is the start-up disk but XP doesnt have one does it? The way I see (tell me if I am wrong):
1. Install new HD and run Fdisk on it (assuming I have a system disk)
2. Put the XP cd in the drive and restart the comp
3. XP installation begins, begiining wif the reformating into NTFS system.
Anything wrong with this?
Thank you.
I have read through some sites but most of them say I need a system disk. I assume this is the start-up disk but XP doesnt have one does it? The way I see (tell me if I am wrong):
1. Install new HD and run Fdisk on it (assuming I have a system disk)
2. Put the XP cd in the drive and restart the comp
3. XP installation begins, begiining wif the reformating into NTFS system.
Anything wrong with this?
Thank you.
Comments
You can partition and format your drives from the XP installation. I HIGHLY recommend making separate partitions for your OS (10GB NTFS), pagefile (5GB FAT32), backup (15GB NTFS), and data (whatever's left FAT32).
Remember FAT32 is faster than NTFS, but less secure.
<b>EDIT:</b> Sorry I forgot to mention that the XP install doesn't do FAT32, so you're going to need fdisk for that - set up your partitions and format the NTFS ones during the install, and run fdisk immediately afterwards on your unformatted partitions.
If you have the ability to put the pagefile on an entirely separate HD, all the better, but if you can't, a separate partition will work well too
What do you mean by that?
What do you mean by that? <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
When fdisk was created it didn't really work for drives larger than a certain size, which I *think* was 512MB.
But Microsoft came up with large disk support for fdisk, so you're able to use it on larger drives now.