justdidit on How to Partition a Hard Drive

easy task. Also, the retailer who sold me the laptop was not very helpful and said they could not undo what I had done. So, learn from my mistake and never try this without proper preparation and without understanding how it works. It will cost you a lot of headaches if you lose valuable data by partitioning a hard drive without backing up your data or by not doing the full system back up.

 

After learning the proper way to partition, I now know how to do it right. I previously partitioned one of my computers that was running on Windows XP. Prior to partitioning, I made sure that I prepared the hard disk according to the manufacturer's instructions. Then, I determined the type of file system I wanted to use, for example, I used NTFS instead of FAT file systems. NTFS is better than FAT since it is more secure than FAT. I backed up my hard drive because I had important data that I did not want to risk of losing. Partitioning and formatting a hard drive will delete all files, backing up was an important step that I made sure to do. If I did not need the files I could have just proceeded without backing up. However, I knew there are files that I would need on the new partition, therefore, I ran the full back up of my system.

 

I also looked for the installation software CDs for all the software that I wanted to reinstall before partitioning. Tip for folks who purchased an upgrade for a program, make sure you have the full version of the original program. The upgrade is useless without the original. I also backed up the updated device drivers that I recently used for the peripheral devices. These are my printers, modems, etc. I modified my computer's BIOS to start from CD or DVD so that after partitioning I can use the Windows XP CD to reinstall the software.

 

In partitioning the Windows XP, I inserted the Windows XP CD into my CD drive. Then, I restarted the computer to start the Windows XP Setup program. At the setup page I pressed "enter", pressed F8 to accept the Windows licensing agreement. Since I already had the Windows XP, I was prompted to repair it. I hit ESC to bypass it. Using the arrow keys, I selected the existing partition, and then also chose non-partitioned space and pressed "C" to partition it. I specified the partition size in MB and pressed "Enter". I needed additional partitions, therefore, I repeated the choosing of unpartitioned disk and proceeding to the previous steps. Then, I proceeded to format and install Windows XP.