Partitioning a hard disk

  • Thread starter Thread starter James D
  • Start date Start date
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James D

Up until Windows XP (and even after) I have always partitioned my hard disk
with FDISK. With the new technology of XP I understand you can now partition
you hard disk within Windows. I would like to hear opinions (or maybe even
concrete facts) as to which way is better. Before alot of you say "Man, XP
all the way!" tell me what happens if you have a hard disk failure and you
cannot reach ANY partitions, or can you? I know that if your C drive had
problems, you could always access the D or subsequent drive in FDISK.
 
James D said:
Up until Windows XP (and even after) I have always partitioned my hard disk
with FDISK. With the new technology of XP I understand you can now partition
you hard disk within Windows. I would like to hear opinions (or maybe even
concrete facts) as to which way is better. Before alot of you say "Man, XP
all the way!" tell me what happens if you have a hard disk failure and you
cannot reach ANY partitions, or can you? I know that if your C drive had
problems, you could always access the D or subsequent drive in FDISK.
Click to expand...

Even if you use the XP disk to partition/format your drive(s) you can still
use a boot disk to access the drives/partitions should your 'C' drive fail.
Of course, this is if your using FAT32 and not NTFS. XP will not
create/format a partition over 32GB as FAT32, but if you use FDISK for this
it can still use the larger FAT32 partition :-)
 
If you can't boot with a hard drive you should be able to boot to the WinXP console with a CDROM. Booting with a CDROM is not a sure thing; try it to see if it works. If your partitions are FAT32 you can use a Win98 boot floppy.
 
WINXP AND W2K both write things to the first 512 Bytes (guess-ta-mate) of
the drive. Both can cause problems when you install a different operating
system. You have to write zeros to the beginning or the whole drive to get
rid of the old operating system sometimes. IBM once told me there is an
advantage to writing Zeros to the entire drive before you use it. It is
kind of like a Write Test for the whole drive. This can help to prevent
drive problems.

Microsoft just does this to make life hard for people who want to change
their computer once in a while. They want to control the entire world.
 
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