Partitioning Newbie

[popotech]

hello,
well i have decided instead of having a back on one huge harddrvie *60gig*, that i will partition all my drive in the department with a image of the hard drive on one partition and the OS on the other. my only problem is i have never partitioned before i have done some reading only to find that everyone is using partition magic. can i partition my hard drive without it in DOS?
thanks

 

[JCurry15]

you can partition your drive by using the FDISK command in Dos. It is a fairly easy to use utility that, if you don't have any data on the drive, you can use to partition it.

Hope this helps

 

[edfair]

Later versions of DOS allow one primary partition active and multiple extended partitions. The partition table area allows 4 partitions. So if you use some program to hide the primary you can create another one. Which is what partition magic effectively does.
Most people use fdisk as it does everything required for normal use. The multiple partitions added with partition magic are to allow dual booting (multiple operating systems available) or some advanced hiding of stuff.
Don't understand what you are trying to accomplish. Data on one drive? OS on another? Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[JCurry15]

My company does basically the same thing as what you are trying to do, I think. You want to put the OS and everything that you need on partition 1 and an image file of that partition on partition #2.

We do that and we actually have the HDD separated into 3 partitions, 1 Fat 16, 1 NTFS and 1 Fat 32. We have the fat 16 partition just have the boot.ini, config.sys, autoexec.bat, etc... on it. The NTFS drive contains the OS and everything else. We have an image of the NTFS drive stored on the FAT 32(so you can access it from DOS and therefore GHOST). We are then able to quickly refresh the computer so that it is back to the desired specs in about 1 hour.

We use FDISK and we make the FAT16 as the primary, then we make a partition with FAT32. We leave the space that will be the NTFS partition empty, and create the partition when you install Windows.

Hope this helps!!