newbie question about a new hd

[JoeCancer]

hi, hopefully this isnt to elementary. i just bought a 40 gig western digital hd last night. i currently have a 6.4 gig seagate. i set up the western digital to be a slave. i ran the "Data Lifeguard Tools" floppy disk to install the drive. when it was time to make the partitions, my only options were to make 1 2 gig drive under fat 16, or i could make 20 2 gig partitons. can i just have 1 or 2 partitions? say like 20 gig a peice? i have an abit bh6 mb, celeron 400, 192mb pc100, geforce2 mx, sblive 5.1, winme. is there a setting in my bios im missing or something?

 

[LordSandMan]

I don't know what the limit is for partitions under winME, but I know it does at least 20 GB, should do 40. I would just use fdisk to partition it, and use the dos FORMAT command to format it.

 

[bacillus]

since ME doesn't natively support dos, then I suggest you go make a startup boot floppy from a win98 pc in control panel/add|remove programs/startup disk & use it to fdisk,partition & format your new hdd!

 

[paruhd0x]

I agree with bacillus, You should format your drive and then use fdisk to partition... oh and FAT16 is suck. Make it FAT32.

 

[JoeCancer]

yea i want it to be fat 32, my other drive(seagate)is fat 32, i dont know why this one didnt give me that option from the floppy.

 

[bacillus]

<< i dont know why this one didnt give me that option from the floppy. >>


if you're using the win98 boot disk then when you first enter fdisk, it will ask if you want large disk support. choose yes as that will make the disk fat 32. no=fat 16!

 

[JoeCancer]

thanks for all the advice guys, im going to go for it tonight. you guys are great, respond really fast and have solid advice... have a good night

 

[fastman]

When you format it it will ask do you want to enable LBA (Large Block allocation) say yes, this will format in FAT32 then FDISK and you should have 2 partitions in FAT32.

 

[JoeCancer]

hey thanks guys i bypassed the 3rd party software(western digital data lifeguard tools ez bootup&quot; and booted from my winme startup disk, i fdisked and formatted and everything is great, thanks for the advice!