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Help with paritioning my HDD and Formating and Installing Win2k (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter SW220
- Start date
First of all it will be good if you provided us with
How big your HDD space is
and what Windows you are using
and if you could tell us your file system type
go to My Computer> Right click on C: Drive , go to properties and look at File System, it should be either FAT 32 or NTFS
How big your HDD space is
and what Windows you are using
and if you could tell us your file system type
go to My Computer> Right click on C: Drive , go to properties and look at File System, it should be either FAT 32 or NTFS
LMAO, 30 gigs 4 partitions?
alrighty then
well for me it will be quite easy, but it's rather difficult to teach over the net, since i haven't used FDISK in ages,
Well let's get the basic things done first
Grab a new floppy disk
Navigate to Add/Remove Programs in Control panel
there should be a tab called Windows Startup Disk
select the tab, insert the floppy disk and click create startup disk
once that's done tell me.
Insert the floppy disk into the drive
reboot the computer
the floppy should be read, then i forgot the menus but it should be Start Computer with CD-ROM Support
then let it all load
until you get this
A:/>
and then you type in
FORMAT C: /U
then when it says Are You sure
then you put Y and press enter
then once it's completed it should say the drive requires a disk label whatever
type ina name to name your hdd whatever u desire
i think it's limited to 9 characters
then once that's completed stick your windows 2000 cd into the drive
then you should come back to
A:/>
type in WINNT32
if that doesn't work type WINNT32.msi
that should work
Thanks champion!
question though: If i have to format my computer in like a few months again, can i still format normally with teh partitions active or do I have to like formate each drive seperately? assuming that I wanted to merge all my partitions back together to form one drive
question though: If i have to format my computer in like a few months again, can i still format normally with teh partitions active or do I have to like formate each drive seperately? assuming that I wanted to merge all my partitions back together to form one drive
If you partitioned your drives, each drive must be formated individually, to merge the partitions together back into one, u need to either run FDISK delete all extended and logical paritions and just create one logical partition (C
, or it can be done with the third party tool Parition Magic from Powerquest, which allows you to partition your hdd and merge them without formating your computer. Please note, if your computers HDD file system is NTFS and not FAT 32 you can't format the way i told u, i.e. using the floppy disk and typing in FORMAT C: it isn't a recognised command, the only way to format is booting off the CD and using the format tool they provide there, or you just run FDISK and delete all logical partitions and create a new one which is by default just a FAT16 which then needs to be formated.
/U is a switch in the format procedure, it allows all the clusters to be cleared in your harddrive, you see you could of just used
FORMAT C:
and that will work but theoretically nothing is cleared away from your computer, when you delete an item and empty it from your recycle bin, what happens is, a special token or tag is placed in front of the file rendering it to be writable, i.e. allocating free space for files to write to, so theoretically if you used FORMAT C: and that's it bring it to some HDD labs to recover data, they can recover it all back for you providing u did not write data to that free'd space.
/U on the other hand stands for Unconditional, i.e. cannot be reverted, so once you format everything, it cannot be recovered back, what it does is it adds the token, and then it writes to the free space blank dummy data, and just frees it up.
Huy
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I wouldn't have liked to explain disks, file systems, partitions or any of what Winston had to deal with over the Internet, or even over the phone.
But here is my solution, for the future.
Boot off the Windows 2000 CD
Your C: will already contain Windows 98
You'll need to format and partition the drives (and reformat) anyway, so here's what I generally do (now that FDISK won't work for my NTFS drives).
Boot off the Windows 2000 CD, install a new Windows - it will tell you that another Windows is currently installed to C:
Before you do this however, you'll need to delete all of the partitions in the list of partitions (or partition table).
Once you've got RAW on every disk, you can create partitions (as many as you want).
Once this has been created, Windows setup will ask for the file system (FAT32, NTFS) and you'll be able to QuickFormat the drive, for clean installation of Windows 2000.
This isn't as complicated as the above step, and only takes a minute or so (pushing a few buttons, confirming the actions, etc).
Booting up using the Windows 2000 CD: half a minute
Deleting existing partitions: 10 seconds
Creating new partitions: half a minute
Formatting the partition: a minute
This can be done in 2-3 minutes tops.
But in the past, I would have used Winston's method if I had a FAT32 disk, and Windows 98 (installing Windows 98 again, or another 9x kernel).
But here is my solution, for the future.
Boot off the Windows 2000 CD
Your C: will already contain Windows 98
You'll need to format and partition the drives (and reformat) anyway, so here's what I generally do (now that FDISK won't work for my NTFS drives).
Boot off the Windows 2000 CD, install a new Windows - it will tell you that another Windows is currently installed to C:
Before you do this however, you'll need to delete all of the partitions in the list of partitions (or partition table).
Once you've got RAW on every disk, you can create partitions (as many as you want).
Once this has been created, Windows setup will ask for the file system (FAT32, NTFS) and you'll be able to QuickFormat the drive, for clean installation of Windows 2000.
This isn't as complicated as the above step, and only takes a minute or so (pushing a few buttons, confirming the actions, etc).
Booting up using the Windows 2000 CD: half a minute
Deleting existing partitions: 10 seconds
Creating new partitions: half a minute
Formatting the partition: a minute
This can be done in 2-3 minutes tops.
But in the past, I would have used Winston's method if I had a FAT32 disk, and Windows 98 (installing Windows 98 again, or another 9x kernel).
Huy
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He/she wants to format his computer and install Windows 2000 (non-upgrade).
PM8 will work, but that's a hassle in the greater scheme of things (for his/her purpose/needs).
I suggest he/she use the built-in disk manager, list of partition tables and format, partition (create new drives) within Windows setup (before the GUI setup, it'll be a blue/grey screen)
PM8 will work, but that's a hassle in the greater scheme of things (for his/her purpose/needs).
I suggest he/she use the built-in disk manager, list of partition tables and format, partition (create new drives) within Windows setup (before the GUI setup, it'll be a blue/grey screen)
@Huy, yes of course your way is easy
i was thinking about that method, but first of all i don't remember the options off by heart lol... and second, the cd doesn't always boot in some comps and i'd hate to explain the BIOS config to set the 1st boot device.
i was thinking about that method, but first of all i don't remember the options off by heart lol... and second, the cd doesn't always boot in some comps and i'd hate to explain the BIOS config to set the 1st boot device.