rutters said:
don't know what HD I've got (how do I tell?)
You have to take it out and look at the make and model.
but here is a "brief" instruction on how to Partition and Format..
Partitioning a Hard Drive means that you are creating the boot sector as well as dividing the Hard Drive into other logical drives (C,D,E, etc.). This step is performed using the FDISK command. This command should be on your system boot disk.
After you Build Your Own Cheap Computer, you need to think about the number of partitions that you intend to make on your Hard Drive or if you want one large partition for the complete Drive.
If your Drive is larger than 2GB, you may want to partition it. With modern Operating Systems (like Windows 98, 2000 and XP) you will want to use FAT32 file system.
You are ready to start.
Partitioning Hard Drive:
Insert the system disk in the floppy drive and reboot computer. After a brief moment, you will be taken to the 'A:>' prompt where you will type the following command:
'FDISK'
This command is used to partition the drive. Follow the menus to create either a single partion for the whole drive or multiple partitions. The first partition must be made active to make it bootable.
You will then see a prompt (DO YOU WISH TO ENABLE LARGE DISK SUPPORT Y/N)?. You should answer "YES". This enables the partition to be created using the FAT32 file system.
You can also continue to accept default entries for all the prompts to partition the drive as a single bootable partition that covers the whole drive.
Exit 'FDISK'; this reboots the system.
Formatting the Hard Drive:
You need to format the Hard Drive before you can install the Operating System.
Firstly, you need to reboot the PC with the system disk and then format each partition that you created. The first partition is formatted using the FORMAT command as follows:
'FORMAT C:'
If you have more partitions, you can format them by running the FORMAT command and changing the drive letter for each partition that needs to be formatted.