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Fundamentals of Partition and Format a Hard Disk Drive

Any new drive must undergo the process of partitioning and formatting before it can be used. Usually in a computer the A: Drive is taken up by the computer by default as the floppy drive for the 3.5” floppies.

The B: drive is not in existence in the modern computers. It is the drive that was used as a default by the floppy drives of 5.25” floppy drive. Al tough by default this drive is considered as the B: drive in the modern computers as well. The C: drive is usually by default taken as the hard drive where the installation proceeds and the boot loader program is set up. If there is more than one partition in this drive then they are taken up by the drive letters D, E, F, and so on.

The CD Rom is taken up by the last letter after the hard drive. The CD writer if any takes up the next drive letter and so on. The drive C: on the computer is called as the primary partition. The rest all are the secondary partitions. There needs to be at least one primary partition.

When the hard drive is a new one it does automatically detect and show up as the C: drive. In such a case the disk driver given by the manufacturer should be taken into consideration. The driver should be used to detect the hard drive. It is not possible to partition the hard disk before formatting it. The hard disk needs to be formatted. Hence use the full format option in the driver Disk to format the hard drive.

If it is a DOS operating system then the use the command now to format the hard drive as format C: and then proceed. Again now for the purpose of partitioning the drive use the command like fdisk to partition the hard disk.

Apart from fdisk there are several options of partitioning the hard disk. Suppose that at first only one partition was intact that is C: and no other partition was made and the windows operating system was installed over it. Now if the fdisk command is used to partition the hard drive then the partition will cause some data from the windows file to be in the other partition.

Hence in that case the software used specifically for partitioning the drive should be used like that of partition magic etc. The file system that can be maintained is FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS etc.

Now in the secondary partition there may again be logical partitions as many as possible. After all the partitioning is complete; the partitions should be formatted in order to convert them to the required file system. Then the usual procedure of installation of the operating system can be progressed.

Suppose if after the partitioning by the fdisk command the partitions are not formatted and the windows operating system is installed. Then the partitions will not be able to use in the windows. They again need to be formatted. Here the option persists to specify whether the partition is FAT or NTFS etc.

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