How do I format and part my secondary HD? - Computer music & technology forums

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Subject: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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Original Message 1/21 28-Mar-00 @ 02:56 AM - How do I format and part my secondary HD?

CWa9150462

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Can someone tell me how to partition and format my extra hard drive. My Cmos is o.k. and the device manager sees it. I have Win/98-Pentium 11. I have C and D on my first drive. Step by step if you would. Thanks. Carl..

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Message 2/21 28-Mar-00 @ 06:01 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

Jasper

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step by step?

Use Fdisk

1) create a primary dos partition

2) create an extended partition

3) create a logical dos drive in the extended partition

hardware central - partitioning

You should be set now.

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Message 3/21 28-Mar-00 @ 04:04 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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no no no !!!!! - jesus Jasper... you are telling the guy will wipe his C & D drive completely... you can only have ONE primary drive...

CWa9150462@aol.com mate... are you in a hurry to do this?.. if NOT, i'll write a proper page for it.. if yes.. i'll post up a quick reply...

but FIRST.. do you know how to enter command-prompt at boot ???

rsvp

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Message 4/21 28-Mar-00 @ 07:30 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

CWa9150462

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Hi K: No hurry. I will wait. I want to be sure of what I am doing. I am pretty good with the prompts and stuff. I built this computer and studied up on dos. But I have never did this before and I am scared for my C and D drives.
My primary drive is getting noisy sometimes, so I wanted to be ready for the crash with a new hard drive loaded and ready. I have primary and secondary on my Mother. I have it on the secondary as master and cd rom as slave.
Thanks. Carl...

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Message 5/21 28-Mar-00 @ 09:17 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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sorry Jasper, i just panicked there, and also didnt read it to close - didnt see that he has two physical drives already installed..... i thought he might delete his 1st-DRIVE primary - i just saw this nightmare scenario of him going in and re-creating the primary partition on C before selecting the new drive.. cos that hardware-central tutorial doesnt mention the drive needs to be selected first.. it just says go in and start to create.. !!

so how big is this new drive ?? ..

also, you say you built your box and installed the 2 drives - C & D drives (two seperate PHYSICAL drives right?)... can't you just do to drive 3 (new one) what you did to drive 2 (D) ??.. or did you forget?.. :-) - it is easy cos it doesnt happen often unless you're building boxes all day for a job..

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Message 6/21 28-Mar-00 @ 09:23 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

John

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Carl, you can do what Jasper says...just make sure that you use option #5 "Change Current Fixed Disk Drive" to select your new physical drive. FDisk will show you how many physical drives there are by giving each a number, and it also shows the partitions for each physical drive which is denoted by the drive letters (C, D, E, etc). When you're done with FDisk, reboot the computer and format the partitions.

But like K says, be extremely careful, and make sure you are making the right choice. The last thing you want to do is destroy the partitions on your Primary Master/"C" Drive.

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Message 7/21 29-Mar-00 @ 11:41 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

CWa9150462

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Hi: I only have one primary drive partitioned as C and D. Now I have added a new 15gig drive in my secondary slot with my cd rom as slave. I want to part the new drive 5gigs for programs and 10gigs for music. Thanks guys, I will look for #5 option. That must be the key. Carl...

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Message 8/21 29-Mar-00 @ 09:09 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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yeah but hold up, cos surely, if he creates a Primary partition on his new drive it'll default to D: and confuse things wont it??... so that what was his D: the logical drive in the extended partition on his 1st drive will n longer be D: ? - man it is so long since i did this... but if I remember right, that will happen - wouldnt he be better off ONLY creating an extended partitoion on the new drive-2 and then making logical E: & F: drives on that, with his CD-rom defaulting to G:..

and then there is the issue of the large drive support to gewt the two large Logical drives E: & F:... and what would best service him for his audio needs...

are you going to record & work with lots of small files ?.. or large files like when multitrack recording ? - wouldnt he be better off using lots of small 2gb FAT logical drives?

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Message 9/21 29-Mar-00 @ 10:24 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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gimme some more time with this.. cos it's something i neeed to get right... there are so many conflicting opinions.. even from writers for mags etc...

but basically, clusters on drives you have to have 65,000 max.. so the bigger the drive, the bigger the clusters... files sit oacorss clusters.. so like the last byte of a file might have to be shunted to a new clsuter and thus that one byte uses the whole 32K cluster cos files cant share clusters...

i guess it is a choice between speed seeking thru more clusters.... FAT 32 etc lets you have 4k clusters i think.. but to further confuse things, there is a switch when formatting FAT16, to set the cluster size manually - - argh!!!...

soon come.. i got study to do....so.. if you use fat16.. the clusters will be large on the 2Gb drives, but for audio files which tend to be in Mbtye chunks.. so spilling over into clusters wont be a problem of waste.. the clusters will be bigger and the file parts spread into bigger chunks with less referencing .. (cos each cluster contains the location of the next file part/cluster etc)... not tiny kilobytes this may be better cos fat16 is robust, and small drives seek fast.. but then the FAT tables are bigger... arghhhhhh!!.. :-)

c'mon.. wheres all the uni boys here !!??

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Message 10/21 30-Mar-00 @ 02:25 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

CWa9150462

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Very interesting K: I am in no hurry. I will wait. I have A-floppy C and D-Primary drive. E-CD recorder F-Zip G-CD rom and that 15 gig HD in there waiting.I understand when it gets parted/formatted, Windows will assign new letters for everything. It will probably become E and F. I'm Fat 32. I am doing larger multitrack recordings.
Thanks again. Carl...

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Message 11/21 30-Mar-00 @ 06:39 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

Jasper

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Here,

Put your 2nd drive in, identify it in BIOS.

Now, you allready have a drive with 2 partitions right? so currently that is C and D and your new drive that has not been setup is currently drive E.

So type Fdisk E:
Now create a DOS partiton by pressing '1',
Now create a Primary dos partition by pressing 1, enter yor choice for size etc.
Now create an extended dos partition by pressing 2 and enter sizes (repeat for further partitions)
Now create a logical dos drive in the extended dos '3' partition or the thing won't work.

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Message 12/21 30-Mar-00 @ 06:39 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

Jasper PART2

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Go back to the main menu and set an active partition (each drive has to have an active partition to contain info about other partitions).
Now press '4' to display partition information.
If it looks right then re-boot.
Now you need to format your new drives E and F (cd-rom will be G and original drive will be C & D)

But first CHECK to make sure you don't accidently format your existing drives C & D.
If for some reason the format fails with a message like 'invalid media unable to format' type error then go back to fdisk and check those setting again.. It may be that you haven't created a logical dos drive in the extended partition.
and whatever you do DONT!!!! do a low level format if you find info about one anywhere cos this is allready done at the factory.. Low-level formats map the drive's errors so that it can be formatted normaly.. screwing this up may leave the drive useless. Format C: is a high-level format so don't worry OK?

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Message 13/21 30-Mar-00 @ 07:25 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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yeah but jasper mate - if he makes a PRIMARY partition on the new drive.. then surely that partition will default to take over the D: drive letter, cos it will be the second PRIMARY visible to dos.. and the 1st extended/logical drive (that is currently D

will get shunted further down the line to become E ?... on my box the 2nd & 3rd drives only have extended partition each devided into logical drives...

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Message 14/21 31-Mar-00 @ 07:23 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

Jasper

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Well it works on mine, which is strange now I come to think of it.

my old drive was partitioned with w98 installed, then I got the new one and took the old one out.. partitioned it (new one) and installed 98 again.

Then my girlfriend asked where all her files had gone I had to connect the old one up as a slave. And it works.

I can still boot up to my old drive by swapping the drives primary/slave status too.

But when you think about the active partition stuff it shouldn't work. Maybe w98 only sees the boot drives active partition and treats the rest as extended or summit.

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Message 15/21 31-Mar-00 @ 02:56 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

CWa9150462

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Hi: I was wondering about that active stuff. I was hoping to have the two drives where I could change the boot sequence in setup and use each drive separatly like having two computers in one. one drive for music and the other for everything else. My new drive is in and the MB see's it and also device manager see's it. It has no letter assigned until it gets formatted. Thanks. Carl...

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Message 16/21 31-Mar-00 @ 04:01 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

Jasper

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well like I said it works for me, the only problem is getting at the jumper switches.

it's ok at the moment cos my girlfriend only user her drive about once every 2 weeks, but if you intend to use both quite often then maybe a dual boot would be more appropriate

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Message 17/21 02-Apr-00 @ 04:30 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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yeah well dos only is written to see one 'active' partition... the first one on C:...

ok... CWa9150462 mate... i've managed to finally get some sleep now.. ok.. i think you should go for fat16 cos the clusters will be bigger and thus less reading for the heads to keep on finding the next file segment/cluster... and with audio files & the combination of a wacking 20gb drive, loosing some Mb's in the clusters is not going to be so bad as if you were storing tons of tiny files... BUt, if you have a drive dedicated to small sample loops.. set it asside, and in Windows you can reformat it to FAT32 if you like which'll create loads more clusters, but will loose less drive space - although frankly, again even sample loops are still going to be like 700k or so for stereo 44.1 etc.. it prolly aint worth it... it might be better to just wait till the drive fills up and get a removable drive sledge kit and another 20gb drive, then you can swap them out according to the material you're working on.. or get a zip or jaz etc...

so...

enter fdisk at the command prompt

say [NO] to the large drive support option....

menu appears - choose 5 to change the drive you are looking at...

select drive 2 your new one - hit enter

you are then presented with a new menu... above it it says you are looking at the fixed disk drive 2

choose menu item 1 - CREATE DOS PARTITION OR LOGICAL DOS DRIVE

choose 2 - CREATE EXTENDED DOS PARTITION

choose the whole drive space available 100%

after youve done that.. new menu comes back... choose 3 - CREATE LOGICAL DOS DRIVES

select the max size which will be just over 2gb

repeat that again and again until you have like 10 logical drives - the last drive will be perhaps a small one with a few hundred mb.. whatever, just keep on each time tou create and get the menu back, creating more logical drives.. until you run out of space...

finally, when all the drives are created .. format the drives...

At the command-prompt - FORMAT E: - FORMAT F: - etc etc

i'd do it that way..

Interestingly, ... there is an un-documented switch in win 95 OSR2 (dunno if it is 98 also).. where you can set the cluster size when using FAT32 !!!... here's the switch...

/Z:n

n * 512 bytes = cluster size - default minimum is 1024 bytes - but that is a bit small.... anyways this is noted for academic purposes :-).. with 20gb drives, sure you'll loose some drive space in total.. but with audio the files will all be large in terms if the percentage clusters contained therein...

for little files like loads of text files then this might waste alot of space, but with big Kb & Mb sized files it will be less.. and generally fat16 drives are faster apparently.... prolly due to less reference reads of the next cluster and smaller overall drive size/head-travel distance...

just defrag your drive/s regularly.. fat16 is also less liable to loose data in a crash... so they say...

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Message 18/21 03-Apr-00 @ 06:21 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

CWa9150462

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Thanks K: I think I have it. Wonderful site. One question- If I put my OS and programs on the first petition of the new drive, can I make that partition active at a later date, in case my C drive crashes. I will snatch the old one out and plug the new one in the primary slot? Thanks. Carl...

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Message 19/21 03-Apr-00 @ 11:40 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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no.. not if you didnt create a PRIMARY partition... the OS has to be in a primary... best bet mate is to go to the pc fair, and buy a drivebay swap kit... then get a backup small cheap drive, but i dont see the point really, cos if you workj for months with your primary drive you have your OS on now, then you swap it if it crashes, none of your settings, programmes etc will be there that youve installed on the main drive... all you'll have is the raw OS and any programmes you loaded when you created it... none of your config will be there for the currect OS drive ... if you wanted to make a dual boot box, you should think about that when you add the main PRIMARY drive - I would NOT recommend fucking with your current C: drive now ... drive overlays etc are a nightmare - there are dua;l boot s/w's out there, i cant recommend any tho, and wether you can add that feature AFTER already setting up and working with your C: drive i also doubt... it'd have to fuck with the current MBR to do it, and i wouldnt recommend that at all... but, if anyone knows a way... speak up

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Message 20/21 31-May-01 @ 04:56 AM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

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the z switch thing resurrected - the forum search is excellent eh! - actualy i was chatting with someone today who reads Dt but never posts, and he was saying how much he sues the forum search and how usefulk it is to find pretty much anything he needs info about

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I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!

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Message 21/21 31-May-01 @ 03:02 PM - RE: How do I format and part my secondary HD?

99devils

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Doh! Should've thought of that, eh?

-Craig

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