Partitioning and Formatting

With the BIOS setup now complete, the hard drive must be prepared to accept data. This is done through the disk management utilities known as partitioning and formatting. With these utilities, you can divide the drive into logical sections, assign drive letters, and physically prepare the disk to accept data. Most new hard drives have already been partitioned and formatted, but you should be familiar with how to use these utilities.

If the drive has already been partitioned and formatted, you simply need to install your operating system from CD, install your software applications, and restore your backed-up data.

If the drive has not been partitioned and formatted, how you proceed is determined by whether or not the new hard drive you have just installed is a secondary hard drive or a new primary hard drive. If the drive is a second hard drive in your system, you can use the utilities on the primary drive to prepare the secondary hard drive.

If the new drive will be your primary drive, you need to access these utilities on some other media format, preferably the Recovery CD that is included with new computers as a matter of course.

How you access these hard drive utilities depends on the operating system you are using. Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista all have different access points, and may identify the folder in which these utilities reside by different names. So you may have to explore your own system to locate them (Control Panel or My Computer is always a good starting point).

To help you understand the process, we’ll briefly outline the steps involved under the following conditions:

You will have to be logged in as administrator in order to run these utilities. Note that the terms ‘partition’ and ‘volume’ are used interchangeably. Also, in Windows Vista, a new hard disk must be ‘initialized’ before it can be used. Proceed as follows:

  1. Open the Control Panel (Start > Control Panel)
  2. Click on ‘System and Maintenance’
  3. Click on ‘Administrative Tools’
  4. Double click ‘Computer Management’
  5. In the left navigation pane, under ‘Storage’, click ‘Disk Management’
  6. In Disk Management, right click the disk you want to initialize, and then click ‘Initialize Disk’.
  7. Right click on the initialized disk, and click ‘New Simple Volume’
  8. In the New Simple Volume Wizard, click ‘Next’
  9. Accept the maximum default size or type in the size of the volume you want to create (in megabytes), then click ‘Next’
  10. Accept the default drive letter assignment, or choose a different letter to identify the partition, and click ‘Next’
  11. In the ‘Format Partition’ dialog box, click ‘Next’ to accept the default settings and format the partition
  12. Click ‘Finish’

Note that the formatting process can take some time; the higher the drive capacity, the longer the process will take.

Once the format is complete, your drive is ready for the operating system, if it is to be the boot drive. Use your original operating system installation CD to install the OS, and then add other software applications and data as needed. This can also take a bit of time, and you don’t have to do it all at once.

Don’t forget to create some restore points periodically so you can restore your system to a previous configuration if something goes awry with one of the installation processes.