Help - formatting a hard drive

GerryDavid

I have a Western Digital 20gb hard drive that I bought back in 2000 or so.

At the time I tried to hook it up to the desktop at the time and it was to old to support the 20gb. So I was playing with it and it ended up getting formatted to 500mb's.

After putting it off for a year, I put it into my new desktop pc. But when I go to my computer, right click on drive e, format, I dont get any options other than 500mbs in the drop down list.

How do I format it back to 500mb's? Do I have to go to the command prompt? I tried "fdisk /?" and it said it didnt know the command, then "format /?" and I didnt see the option I was looking for.

If it helps, the pc is windows xp, 2.4ghz emachine.

Theres som options that I dont know whats best. It offers Fat32, fat and ntfs for file systems, whats best for windows xp? And for allocation file size, I had more options than default before but now it says default.

Also Id like to devide the drive up into 2 parts, one for a scratch disk for photoshop, the other for some picture storage/backup. 10gb's isnt much but maybe put the pictures ive worked on to be prints over there or something.

Any advice is welcome. :0)

dragon300zx

Gerry,

Let me start this buy saying I am more of a doer than a teacher when it comes to this stuff as all day long I get paid to do it so I will see what I can do.

First off you have to repartition the hard drive. One way to do this is boot with a windows 98 boot disk and type in fdisk at the command prompt.

Enable fdisk for large disk support

Erase the old partition (back up any data you have on it first) and then create a new partition that is the size you want. This should be a primary partition.

Now you can format the drive. You can format and convert the drive to ntfs through the windows xp software. I havent tried partitioning though it yet though as I have always done my partitioning directly from a boot disk.

Hope this helps.

luckyrwe

Under "Computer Management" look for "Disk Management" and it is all GUI based from there.

GerryDavid

Thanks for the help. :0) Its a bit late tonight so Ill try it tomorrow. :0)

luckyrwe

Dragon, that sounds good if you are partitioning and formatting your C: drive, but if it is an aditonal drive it's much easier than that, thankfully!

dragon300zx

What can I say I'm a geek and have a tendency to do everything from command prompts its faster and easier for me than going through a GUI.

GerryDavid

dragon300zx wrote:

What can I say I'm a geek and have a tendency to do everything from command prompts its faster and easier for me than going through a GUI.

I usually go to the dos prompt when I am looking for a specific extension, my computer doesnt like to show extensions for some reason. I seen a way to make it display it ages ago but I havent been able to since.

There hasnt been a real dos in windows for a good while now. I think they removed the fdisk command from the dos clone in the newer versions.

I got it to work with the control pannel, something rather. :0)