PARTITIONING YOUR HARD DRIVE USING FDISK

Nobody wants to setup their hard drive as one giant data dump. Dividing your drive into multiple partitions makes mutitasking easier. Keeping different types of data such as work documents, mp3s, video files, etc in a partition separate from the operating system can greatly increase your computer’s performance. And if you are planning on using multiple operating systems then you will absolutely need multiple partitions.

What Is Partitioning ?
A partition can be assumed as a container, like one drawer of a file cabinet. Each partition uses a file system to store and name data. Windows 98 used FAT32 which allowed greater maximum partition sizes and stored data more efficiently than the FAT16 file system of DOS and Windows 95. Windows NT introduced NTFS file system, which offers better data security and efficient memory handling. Windows 2000 and XP can read and write to both NTFS and FAT32 partitions.

Partitioning Your Hard Drive Using FDISK

Follow these simple steps after runnning FDISK command in command prompt to partition your harddrive:

1. First, to view a list of all drives available on your system select (5).
2. Press (4) to view partition information on the drive, then select the new hard drive.
3. Select (1) to create a partition, then on the next screen choose (1) to create a primary partition on that drive.
4. Select (y) if you wish to use all the space on the drive for this one partition(which we don’t want to), or (n) if you wish to make more than one partition on the drive now or later. If you selected (n), enter the amount of space you wish to use for the primary partition.
5. By selecting (n) it means that you do want to create multiple partitions, you must now make a secondary partition using the rest of the free space.

6. Press (1) to create another partition, then (2) to create an extended DOS partition. While it gives you an option to use less than full amount of space on the disk here but any space which is not allocated now can no longer be used by FDISK unless you erase the existing partitions. So accept the default (maximum available) size for the extended partition, then press ‘ESC.’ This will take you to the menu for creating logical drives in the extended partition

7. To create a logical drive which are represented by drive C: or D: etc, simply fill in the amount of space you require the drive to have.
After you finished performing all this procedure, Exit from FDISK, reboot to windows.