Thursday, November 23, 2006

The GATR Guide to Partitioning a Brand New Hard Drive Without A Boot Disk or CD Rom

First a little introduction. I recently on a whim purchased a massive 160GB hard disk. It was actually dirt cheap (god bless work contacts), and so I didn't feel too guilty purchasing it. I had no idea what I'd use it for - my porn collection isn't as big as it used to be, so any ideas would be appreciative (was thinking about dual booting it with Ubuntu, so any Linux advice would be appreciative also). After a big BIOS message in red (which scared the shit out of me), I took out the behemoth, skype'd Han, who calmed me down from my "it's not working" blubbery state, told me exactly what to do, and mocked me for requiring a girl for his computer problems.

Lo and behold, she worked her magic tutorial skills on me, and it worked. In part. Plus point - my computer was starting up. Minus point - I couldn't use it because it was unformatted. Every single tutorial I found required either FDisk (something in Windows 2000 and below), or the XP boot disk (which I do have, however my CD-RW drive is screwed). Nothing on how to do it on a stand alone machine....until I found an unlikely source.

An old .net magazine.

Lo and behold, it worked! Now, as I couldn't find it online, I've taken the liberty to rewrite the article so that it can be here for time to come. Aren't I lovely? Here goes anyway.

1. Bring up the Control Panel, and click on "Administrative Tools"

2. Click on the shortcut icon to Computer Management. It should bring up the following screen.

3. Click on "Storage", then "Disk Management (Local)". The right side of the screen should look similar to this

4. One of the drives (the unformatted drive) should be unallocated (usually the disk1), right click on it and check "Initialize Disk"

5. Right-click the drive and click "New Partition". In the partition wizard you should be asked the Partition Type; specify primary, the partition size; specify the full drive capacity, the drive letter; specify the drive letter you wish to have the drive to be, and the format partition; specify NTFS or FAT32. I'm not going to bore you with the details of it, as if you are able to install a new hard drive, you should be able to know what I've just talked about.

RIght, sorry for the boring entry, but I imagine somebody would find it useful. My life however hasn't been much more blog worthy. I've been working, eating a lot, drinking very little and skyping with the Gorgeous Han all my days. Not exactly mile a minute living, is it?

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