How to Run Fdisk on Windows XP Pro

Video Transcript

"Did you know most boot problems in Windows could be fixed with Fdisk? Hi, I'm Dan Afonso from Enfold IT and Afonso Consulting, and this is how you run Fdisk on Windows XP. It's actually a bit of a misnomer. There is no Fdisk in XP and XP Pro. They got rid of it. Fdisk, if you recall, it used to be used to manage partitions. Now, your average Windows machine -- Dos 2 -- would have its hard drive partitioned or broken up into separate logical units where you could store data. These would be your C drive, your D drive. And back in the day, they served a very useful purpose when drives could only be 32 Megs in size. Nowadays, it's getting less and less useful, unless you want to separate out your data for some reason. They got rid of Fdisk in XP Pro, but that doesn't mean the functionality is not there. You're going to use Fdisk for two purposes. One is to re-partition. This is best served by going in and right-clicking on My Computer or on your desktop if you have it, and you can go to Manage. Now, once the Management screen comes up, you're going to see disk management. This is going to allow you to do the exact same things. You're going to be able to set up partitions, delete partitions, format partitions, which is more than you could do in Fdisk. You can create different volumes, which are like partitions, but you can do more things with them. That's really not important to this. But the other thing you could do with X... with Fdisk that you can't with this was to fix the master boot record. The master boot record told the machine how to boot up or where to go to to find its boot up files. If this gets destroyed, well, your machine's probably not going to boot very well. Now, the way to fix this is you want to boot into a recovery console for Windows XP. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to... this virtual machine here. So we're just going to boot up into a different virtual machine with the XP disk. So we're going to fire up our machine. It's got the X... it's got XP on the drive. I'm going to hit a key to boot from the disk, and now it's just going to go through the XP installation. Same as always, if you need to install the drivers here to get your hard drives available, do so. And we'll skip the F... the automated system recovery. Now, when it gets to this point, it's ready to start the recovery console and you're going to push R. That's going to bring up the recovery console. It's going to search your disks to see an installation of Windows. Now, it's going to give you a list -- the ones it finds. You're going to tell it which one to log in to. I'm going to go with one, which is the first one it found -- the only one I have on the disk. It's going to ask you for your administrator password. Pop that in, and it'll give you a command prompt much like the old one. You can type help and get a list of commands that you can have on there. In order to fix the MBR, you're going to use the appropriately named Fix MBR command. Fix MBR C:, done. Same thing as Fdisk/MBR -- the command that used to fix your booting. In addition to this, there's the disk part program which will allow you to create and allow partitions as you need them. From here, you can also disable, enable services and do a whole lot of other things to get Windows to boot. I'm Dan Afonso, from Enfold IT and Afonso Consulting, and this has been how to use Fdisk on XP Pro."