Partitioning A Hard Drive During the XP Installation Process
Posted by: Helen on: December 26, 2005
Boot the computer with the XP CD in the drive and allow setup to begin. When the screen appears showing the existing partitions and unpartitioned space available on the computer you should see a drive listed in the lower portion of the screen. Beneath the drive you’ll see one of two things; if the drive has not been partitioned it should say Unpartitioned Space and list the size of the drive, or if the drive has been partitioned previously it should list the drive letter, the size of the drive and the amount of space free on the drive. with all the space listed as unpartitioned. See Fig. 01 below.
Fig. 01
If the drive was in use previously you’ll see all the partitions listed that are currently on the drive. To delete all the existing partitions hit the ‘D‘ key followed by the ‘L‘ key. The screen instructions will be visible to guide the process. Remember that deleting the partitions destroys all the data with no chance of recovery. Once all the existing partitions are deleted the display will show the total unpartitioned disk space, the same as shown in Fig. 01.
Creating a partition on the drive can take one of two paths. If you only want one partition then hit enter and the entire disk space will be allocated to a single partition and you’ll be taken to a screen where you select a file system. However, if you want to createone partition of a specific size or several different partitions then do not hit the Enter key. Instead, hit the ‘C‘ key to create a partition as shown in Fig. 02 . Hit ‘Backspace‘ until the cursor moves to the first digit location. Enter the size of the first partition to be created. Repeat the create partition process as many times as you want until either the desired number of partitions has been created or all available drive space is allocated to partitions.
Fig. 02
Once all the partitions have been created, use the ‘Up‘ arrow key to select the C drive partition and press the ‘Enter‘ key to install XP to the partition. Before the install actually begins you’ll see the screen shown in Fig. 03 below. It’s necessary to choose a file system and format the partition before the installation can proceed. A discussion of FAT32 versus NTFS is available here.
Fig. 03
Once the file system has been selected the partition will be formatted and the installation will complete. After XP has been installed and is running, navigate to Disk Management to see a graphical representation of what has been accomplished using the built in disk partitioning utility that’s included on the XP installation CD. A few examples with an explanation of each are shown below.
Example One
| This partitioning scheme illustrates what happens if you hit the ‘Enter’ key as shown in Fig. 01 above. The entire Disk 0 is partitioned as a primary partition and given the drive letter C. In this example I selected the FAT32 file system but it could have just as easily been NTFS by making a different selection in Fig. 03.
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Example Two
| This partitioning scheme illustrates one possibility if you hit the ‘C’ key as shown in Fig. 01 above. In this example I created a single partition and specified the size to be 4000MB. Rather than using the entire Disk 0, only 4000MB of Disk 0 is partitioned as a primary partition and given the drive letter C. In this example I selected the NTFS file system but it could have just as easily been FAT32 by making a different selection in Fig. 03. The remainder of the space on Disk 0 not being used on the drive is shown as Unallocated. At a later time it can be partitioned, formatted, and assigned drive letters for use.
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Example Three
| This partitioning scheme illustrates another possibility if you hit the ‘C’ key as shown in Fig. 01 above. In this example I first created a single partition and specified the size to be 2000MB. Rather than using the entire Disk 0, only 2000MB of Disk 0 is partitioned as a primary partition and given the drive letter C. In this example I selected the NTFS file system but it could have just as easily been FAT32 by making a different selection in Fig. 03.Rather than leave the remainder of the space on Disk 0 as Unallocated as I did in Example Two, I then repeated the partitioning process (using the ‘C’ key as shown in Fig. 01 above) five more times, each cycle creating an additional 2000MB partition. After all the partitions were created there is still 933 MB of unused space. Since the 933 MB are a part of the extended partition it’s listed as free space rather than unallocated space.
If you read previous sections of this article you may remember that a single hard disk, such as Disk 0 in this example, can contain up to four primary partitions or three primary partitions and one extended partition. One of the limitations of using the setup partitioning method is that any additional partitions created after the first primary partition will be logical drives and placed within an extended partition.
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A final note for this section. While you ‘can’ use the setup partitioning utility for some tasks during the installation of XP, the utility is rather limited in scope. My experience has been that it is best suited for setting up a basic partition like the one shown in Example Two. Allocate sufficient space to the one primary partition that will hold the operating system and leave the remaining space unallocated. After the installation is complete you can use Disk Management or other third party partitioning tools to further develop a partitioning scheme that is better suited to your individual needs.
