<div class="IPBDescription">questions..</div> How do I go about doing this, and how safe is it? And is there anything I should know before I do it, like any programs to DL or anything?
If you want to partition w/o wiping the hard drive clean, you'll have to get Partition Magic Pro or something like that. I'm leary of doing it that way.
The best way to partition your drive is to do it when you are doing a fresh install of your OS. If you're installing something other than WinXP (and perhaps Win2K, but I dont remember), you'll have to make a boot disk and put format.com and fdisk.exe on it. Fdisk will create partitions, and then you have to format them all.
It is perfectly stable and great to do. I have 2 partitions, one to keep Windows and applications on, the 2nd to keep games, MP3s and whatever files I want to keep. So whenever I want to reinstall Windows, I just format the first partition and start over, and it wont affect the 2nd partition, so you can keep all your files there w/o worry.
what are you planning to do? Asking about safety tells me either a) you still have data on your HD that you still wanna save or b) you are unsure if it would bring permanent damage to your hardware.
If its a), first make sure you got free unpartitioned space to partition. As well, your data doesnt get erased until you tell it to. If its b) dont worry, nothing gets damaged.
fdisk on any old microsoft bootdisk is usually sufficient for partiioning stuff. Its not wussy about things (like how the DR-DOS version of fdisk refuses to delete partitions sometimes) and has yet to fail at anything for me. However, if you have unpartitioned space in the beginning of your drive and a partition following it, Im not sure how to make a partition with the free space with the ms fdisk <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif' /><!--endemo--> . Also, if you are installing XP, know that it cant make NTFS partitions, but if you leave a (any type) partition for it, you can format it to NTFS when installing it.
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The best way to partition your drive is to do it when you are doing a fresh install of your OS. If you're installing something other than WinXP (and perhaps Win2K, but I dont remember), you'll have to make a boot disk and put format.com and fdisk.exe on it. Fdisk will create partitions, and then you have to format them all.
It is perfectly stable and great to do. I have 2 partitions, one to keep Windows and applications on, the 2nd to keep games, MP3s and whatever files I want to keep. So whenever I want to reinstall Windows, I just format the first partition and start over, and it wont affect the 2nd partition, so you can keep all your files there w/o worry.
If its a), first make sure you got free unpartitioned space to partition. As well, your data doesnt get erased until you tell it to. If its b) dont worry, nothing gets damaged.
fdisk on any old microsoft bootdisk is usually sufficient for partiioning stuff. Its not wussy about things (like how the DR-DOS version of fdisk refuses to delete partitions sometimes) and has yet to fail at anything for me. However, if you have unpartitioned space in the beginning of your drive and a partition following it, Im not sure how to make a partition with the free space with the ms fdisk <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif' /><!--endemo--> . Also, if you are installing XP, know that it cant make NTFS partitions, but if you leave a (any type) partition for it, you can format it to NTFS when installing it.