How To Build Your Own Computer phần 6 doc

STEP 24 : Prepare the Hard Drive

In order to use your hard drive, it must be partitioned and formatted. If you

are building a system and putting a previously used hard drive into it, you may

not need to perform this step. But, on any new hard drive or one you are just

trying to start over with, you will need to do this.

Partitioning a hard drive means that you are creating the boot sector

(necessary to boot the machine) as well as dividing the hard drive into actual

drive volumes (C,D,E, etc). This action is done using the FDISK command.

FDISK should be included on your system disk and when you use it, it will

actually be run off of the floppy drive. If, for some reason, your system disk

does not have FDISK.EXE on it, get one that does.

Take a little time to plan your partitions. Do you want one large partition for

the entire drive? Or do you want to separate it into different drive volumes? If

you have FAT32, it is very popular to create one partition for the entire drive.

Otherwise, if you are using a drive larger than 2G, you will have to separate it

into more than one partition. Also, keep in mind that smaller partitions lead to

smaller clusters, thus less slack or wasted disk space. With almost any modern

operating system (I’m thinking Windows here) you will want to use the FAT32

file system. When you go into FDISK, it will ask if you want to enable “Large

Disk Support”, and you do if you’re using any OS Windows 98 or newer.

So, start.

1. Type "fdisk" at the command prompt. If it does not work, it is because

your hard drive is not attached properly or you may be missing

FDISK.EXE on your system disk.

2. It will ask if you wish to enable Large Disk Support, and in most cases,

you will. Type “Y” and proceed.

3. Next, you will see 4 menu options. If you already have partitions on this

hard drive, you can choose option 4 to view the current partition setup

and decide if you want to change it. For a brand new drive (which I’m

assuming for the purpose of this tutorial), you’ll need to start from

scratch.

Some information: The first partition is your primary DOS partition. This

is your C: drive and can't be divided. This is also called the active

partition. You can only have one active partition. The second partition is

optional. It is called an extended partition. This is the space left over

after the primary partition. Then, logical DOS drives are created within

the extended partition, each having a letter by which you will refer to it.

4. First you have to setup a primary DOS partition. Choose Option 1

(Create DOS partition or Logical DOS drive).

5. Choose Option 1 in the next menu.

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6. Now you can make your entire hard drive the primary partition or only a

part of it. Many people just make the entire drive one partition just to

stay simple. If you want to break from this norm, specify the amount of