Hard Drive FAQs

All modern PC computers store the Operating System(O/S) on a hard drive.All Hard drives must be prepared for this.There are 2 operations that need to be done.1:Partitioned.2:Formatted.

Window's drive/partition limitations are.Win95/A(FAT 16) 2.1 gig.Win95B and later(FAT32)2,000 gig(2 Tera Bytes).Some drives come with"Software" that can defeat older BIOS limitations,however you should NOT use this software if your BIOS supports the new larger drives.WinNT/XP can also use the NTFS(New Technology File System) which has a theoretical partition limit of 16 Exabytes or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes (2^64 sectors).

New mother boards(Like RAID boards) may come with 4 IDE connectors allowing you 8 hard drives/Cdrom/DVDs etc and use the new Faster ATA/UDMA 66/100/133/150 drives or you can buy a PCI add-on card that will allow you to use larger faster drives on your old system and some of these cards can also be,"RAID" cards.However you must also check that the,"Add-on"card is compatible with your mother board..For Better information on this,"Specialist"subject Click Here

Partitioning An Excellent tutorial page.From Win95B and later Always say YES to Enabling Large disk support otherwise fdisk will Partition as FAT(16) which is the old File Allocation Table and cause your partition to only handle 2.1 gig.Also when using Fdisk to Re-Partition I've found it best to shut down and re-boot after each operation to get a good Partition setup.This has stopped no end of headaches.

2:Formatting Note:!A Low Level Format(LLF) is not normally needed and should not be done by the average home user.Should you have major problems with a drive follow the links at the bottom for Company links and specialist programs sites.Most hard drives come with a 3 year warranty and not a 1 year warranty so check!

Installing windows/Kramer Re-install

Multiple Partitions.

Multiple Partitions\How To Page

With the decrease in price and increase in hard drive size splitting up your hard drive into more than one partition can be very advantageous.Many people now use their systems as a full,"Multimedia"system and install large modern games and download large DVD and MP3 files.Storing these on a single partition will fragment the,"System"drive/partition very quickly and slow down the system thus requiring running,"Defrag"more often.99% of programs allow you to choose which drive/partition to install to.As an example I've put my partition setup below.

This is one of my system setups with a 20 gig(Gigabyte) hard drive and split it up into 3 sections for my usage.C= 2 gig D= 9 gig E= 9 gig.I install all my large games and programs to the D partition and all my large download files to the E partition.This means that my C drive where the Operating system is does not get as fragmented as often and also will Defrag much faster and is something you should do around once a month if not more Good Housekeeping With Operating Systems and drives getting larger I would suggest 5 or 10 Gig now for your C drive.

Hardware mother board BIOS(Basic In Out System) limitations are commonly 512 meg/2.1 gig.8.3/32 gig but there may be other slightly different ones.More info here.Wims BIOS Page or from your mother board maker's site.

If you are installing a new hard drive then click here.

New System Using old Hard drive

You can usually just Copy your old hard drive with your Windows on it to the new system and not have to reformat and re-install windows which is a waste of time and data by copying the whole lot to the new drive as a Slave,then swapping the drives/Changing the jumpers to suit.If you are fitting a new mother board here are few ways to do this.The easiest is this.Install drive/F8 boot up/Safemode/System/Device Manager and remove EVERY entry that windows will let you and re-boot.Windows will now rebuild and ask for drivers disks if it needs them and or the windows disk unless you have copied and installed windows from hard drive.I make a Folder called Drivers with Sub folders for all my hardware device drivers and extract/put them in these folders.Another way is to use the Information on Here but NOT remove ACPI and once in windows re-run the control panel/Add New Hardware Wizard!

Recap/Checklist

1:Choose the correct jumper settings on the hard drive before fitting.There is usually a legend on the drive to tell you which jumper goes where or read the manual or visit the maker's site.

2:Most hard drives have 4 settings and they must,"ALL"be correct,
Master
Master+slave
Slave
C/S(Cable Select) where the position of the drive on the IDE cable decides if it's Master or Slave.Don't use this option under normal circumstances.Some hard drives just need to be set to Master and the Slave to Slave.

3:You,"MUST" use an 80 wire 40 pin IDE cable on UDMA/ATA 66/100/133/150 drives.These are usually colour coded for the plug that goes to the mother board either Read or Blue.

4:If it's a new drive it must be,"Partitioned"before it can be,"Formatted" and then you can install the operating system.

5:If you are partitioning to FAT2 in Win95/98/ME you,"MUST" say,"Yes" to,"Enable Large Disk Support" when using MS fdisk otherwise you can only use 2 gig partitions.

6:If you want to re-partition a drive from an NTFS file system you cannot use the Win95/98/Me fdisk to remove the NTFS partition properly.Go to Boot Disk.com and get the Aefdisk utility and when run from a boot floppy issue the \delall command.Then re-boot and use the normal fdisk.

7:If you are going to use both drives to copy a lot of data around like sound or video editing then,"Don't" place them on the same IDE port/channel.This is because if both drives are accessed at the same time they will fight over the data bus.Split the drives as 2 masters and have your Cdrom drives as slaves split as well.
Note:It's common myth that having two hard drives or Cdrom drives of different speeds on the same IDE channel/port slows down the faster one.This only occurs if,"Both" drives are being accessed at the same time.If one is not in use then as far as the other is concerned it doesn't exist.

8:To speed booting times and if your BIOS allows it like mine you can change from,"Auto-detection" of the hard drive to,"User" and press Enter key.This manually auto-detects the drives so that the system doesn't check for the drives every time on bootup.

9:WinXP you need to Update with SP1 to get UDAM/ATA 133 speeds and support for >137 gig hard drives

Boot Disks and Specialist Programs | Hardware Maker's Links | Harry's Place/Boot Managers etc

Home

Shep's Help

| Quick Tune Up(Highly recommended) | Tips | FreePrograms |

Sign My GuestBook View My GuestBook