Basic Partition Question 1

[Excelerate2004]

Hello everybody,

I'm wondering if I could get some help as to what to do next:

I have a 10 GB hard drive with 2 partitions

- drive C 3.93 GB NTFS (System)
- drive D 5.39 GB NTFS (Boot)

I just bought an additional 80 GB hard drive and intsalled it in my tower Giving me

- 74.53 GB unallocated

I need to format and partition this drive, do I need to install an operating system on this drive for me to access it? How much should I alott for each partition on this new drive, I just basically wanted it for more space for files.

Whats the best thing to do.

How do I go about doing this?

I'm running win XP, Intel Pentium II, 448 MHz processor

In the control panel I click on Computer management Icon and then on the left there is a disk management option. From here I can see my other disk partitions plus the unallocated drive at 74.53 GB .

When I right click on this partition for the newly installed drive I get the option to initialize the disk. Is this the next step?

Basically I'm looking for a step by step process. Is there a resource that I could use that someone may know about?

Or is this just a simple follow along prcoedure?

Thanks for any help I can get.

P.S If I bought an 80 GB hard drive where did the other 6 GB go when it tells me I have only 74.53 unallocated?

 

[wolluf]

Disk management is straightforward to use (and has a HELP if you need it). This is what you should be using to partition your new drive.

The lost 6GB is down to different definitions of gigabyte (many posts about this on tek tips). Basically disk manufacturers definie a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. Whereas operating systems & apps use other definitions - commonly 1024 cubed (kilobyte being 1024 bytes) - but also 1024 squared x 1000 and 1,024,000,000.

So if you divide 80,000,000,000 by 1024 cubed, you'll get to about what you're seeing.

 

[cdogg]

In addition, you'll want to place your system partition on the faster drive and move the page file over to the other. That should help somewhat in overall performance.

Yep as wolluf said, 1GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes. The 80GB drive you purchased is only 80,000,000,000 bytes in "marketing" terms. When you divide it out, you get approximately 74.5 real GB.


~cdogg
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