P. Bournias, Management Information Systems and Technology

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WINDOWS RESOURCE #2

XP SYSTEM SETUP & CONFIGURATION
- Partitioning the hard drive

So whether you already have your system setup or are starting it from scratch, the first thing that you want to do is to partition your physical hard disk into to logical drives. An example of what this does is that it is like cutting your hard disk into two parts (or more if you desire and if you happen to have an extremely large capacity hard disk) so that the system will see drives C & D rather than just C.

Here is a visual on that:

First, this can be done for any desktop, server, and laptop.  Will it cause any damage to the hard disk drive, No.

The next question is how to do it?

To repartition the hard drive, I suggest that you use Partition Magic originally by Powerquest and now offered by Norton Symantec, if you are already have Windows up and running and don't want to reinstall from scratch, see #2 below.
A link to Partition Magic

#1: If you are installing your system from scratch and you have a Microsoft Windows installation cd, then it can be done during the beginning of the installation by telling Windows that you want to use on a portion of the hard drive, say 50%.  By the way, 20 gigabytes are more than adequate (including all of Windows programs and all of the Office programs and much more) for the average user using Windows XP whether it is the home or pro version.

Then Windows will also give you a chance to indicate that you also wish to use the second partition so that both can be formatted by the installation program.  You want to do this so that when your system is finally loaded, your drives will be in a logical sequence of:

hard drive as C:\
hard drive as D:\
CD or DVD as E:\

and not:

hard drive as C:\
CD or DVD as d:\
hard drive as e:\

Once you have finished repartitioning your system as above, then continue installing Windows .

#2: This assumes that you have a minimum of 40 gigabytes or hard disk and that no more than 40% of that is free for system use.
If you already have Windows installed, then the best way to change your current partition into more partitions is as follows:
Be prepared to not use your system for awhile (hours / day) depending on how often you do the following maintenance.
Disconnect your system from the internet, exit any unnecessary programs running on the task bar, and disable your anti-virus until all of the maintenance is complete to help things go smoother and quicker.

Assuming that you are using Windows XP, you can issue the following command from the START RUN %SystemRoot%\System32\cleanmgr.exe or have a look at START PROGRAMS ACCESSORIES SYSTEM TOOLS disk cleanup.
This Windows utility will clean a variety of garbage files that are accumilated on your system.

One warning:  You do not want to clean the COMPRESS OLD FILES, because unfortunately most users don't know that Windows XP has a compression enabled that will compress files and programs that you don't use very often, and placing a check on this item will delete those files and programs!

After cleaning up your disk, it may take awhile if you haven't done this before, you should then run the following:
Click on My Computer, then click on Local Disk (C:\ ), then right mouse click on properties, tab TOOLS Check Now.
You will most likely see a message that will tell you that it has to do this after rebooting the system, accept it and reboot.

The last part of this maintenance is:
START PROGRAMS ACCESSORIES SYSTEM TOOLS disk defragmenter
Note:  If you have been using Norton's Utilities or some other system and/or disk maintenance, then the above should finish quicker.

PARTITIONING:
When you have finished this maintenance, install and run partition magic.  Partition Magic will show you visually your entire
hard disk and allow you to specify what percentage or exact amount you wish to separate into a newly created partition.
Additionally, if you should by chance come close to filling one partition to capacity, you can use partition magic to reallocate free space from another partition with available free space to the one that is nearing capacity.

Once you have finished repartitioning your system as above, then it's time to begin installing Windows.