** Partitioning HD in XP **

[Bill Lane]

Hi All:

I was told how to do this before, and I copied and saved the instructions, but it didn't work for me this time.

First of all I ran FDISK/MBR, FDISK and deleted all partitions, then set up my primary partition to one large drive and set it active, rebooted and formated C:/s, rebooted and set Bios to CDROM 1st. boot, rebooted and installed WinXP Pro (clean install), set to NTFS, Everything went smooth.

Went to Disk Management and right clicked on the unallocated space, but this time it didn't give me a choice of creating partitions, it just had "Change Drive Letter and Path". Format was grayed out, and no partitioning showed at all.

If anyone can tell me what I'm doing wrong I'd really appreciate it, and thanks ahead of time.

OS: WinXP Pro
Mobo: Chaintech S845PE Socket 478 ATX MB, with Sound & Lan.
Vid. Card: Chainteck 64MB GeForce2 Pro AGP.
BAFO USB Linq.
All WinXP updates downloaded.
AVG Free installed with all updates.
Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D installed.
Sprint DSL / Earthlink.
Set to 1024x768 (Highest 32bit).

Everything seems to be working okay, at least so far.

Bill Lane

[Panama Red]

None of the steps prior to the XP install was necessary. The XP disk offers all the options you need to do the partitoning and installation. I'd reinstall XP and this time when it finds the existing installation and offers the option to repair, pick new installation. Then Delete all partitions. This will effectively leave you with an unformatted drive. Then Create the partition size you want to use for the C: drive but don't begin the installation. Instead also Create the additional partition(s). Then do the fresh install on the C: drive selected NTFS and letting it do a full format of C:. Once the installation is complete, go into Disk Management and format the remaining partition(s). If you still have problems after that, start over and use the hard drive makers utility software to write zeros to the disk. Using FDISK may have caused the problem.

[EzyStvy]

"then set up my primary partition to one large drive and set it active"

Technically, you shouldn't have any unallocated space??

[Bill Lane]

Thanks Panama Red & EzyStvy,

I was afraid you were going to say that, well, I guess I'll just get on with it.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Bill Lane

[Bill Lane]

Thanks Again Panama Red & EzyStvy,

That worked great once I figured out the size of the partitions.

Thanks again,

Bill Lane