Comfortable with installing everything but the OS. Help.

[Dashel]

Well I'm going through a mental checklist of everything I need to do to get my new PC running once I have all the components. I am comfortable with installing all the hardware. Motherboard, RAM, CPU, Cards, fans etc...

Where I get stuck is how to start from a blank Hard Drive and getting my OS working. I know I have to format it. How exactly though? I remember doing it a long time ago in DOS and I cant even remember the syntax to do it that way. We used to have bootable disks with FDisk on it and all that. Partition the drive, install the CD Rom drivers, install the OS from CD.

So how is it done today? Is there a good guide someone could point me to? It's been a while since I did it in school =)

 

[Jeff7181]

I should create a guide for this... lemme see if I can remember exactly how it goes...

Turn on the computer, enter the BIOS, make sure it's set to boot from the CD-ROM drive before the HDD.
Reboot and put the CD in while it's booting, you'll probably have to "press any key to boot from CD"
Windows installation will start, you'll be prompted to press F6 to install SCSI or RAID drivers (this is where you'd install SATA drivers)
After that completes, and the driver installation completes if you needed to do that, it will say something like, to continue installation of Windows press Enter, to quit press F3
When you press enter, you'll go through the lisence agreement crap where you press F8 to accept the agreement.
Then you'll come to the screen that shows you the hard disk info... it will probably just show one item if it's a brand new drive, and you'll have to press C to create a partition in the available space. Decide how big you want your partition, you enter the size in megabytes in the field, then it will ask you to format it, NTFS will probably be your only option, and quickformat will not be an option... so you'll have to wait about 1 minute per 5 GB of space you have assigned to the main partition which will be C: (I just estimated the time based on my previous experiences, YRMV)
After that, you'll be taken back to the screen you were at that shows hard disk info... you'll press Enter to setup Windows on the selected partition.
At that point, Windows installation will start and then you just go through it step by step as it tells you when to enter the CD Key and the time zone etc.
After you've installed Windows and you're at the desktop, THEN you can right click My Computer, go to manage, then to Disk Management and partition the rest of the drive. Create an Extended Partition in the rest of the free space, then create logical partitions in side the Extended Partition.
After that, pretty much all you have to do is install updates and install your software.

BTW... that procedure is for Windows 2000 or Windows XP... previous versions are different.

 

[Finnkc]

yep that is how you do it.

Boot your OS CD (Windows) and it will start the install ...

Once the install has started just follow the instructions and away you go.

 

[Dashel]

Aha thanks very much! Sounds simple now that it's all writen out for me heh.

Final question (I hope). Would someone be able to suggest how to partition it? Meaning do people normally have one partition for the OS then the rest for data storage? How big a partition for the OS should I set?

 

[Jeff7181]

here's how I have mine partitioned...

C: = Windows = 8 GB (I use this for Windows and all my general use programs like Word, Excel, Benchmarking utilities, mapping software etc.
D: = Swap + Temp Internet Files = 2 GB (I have my swap file set to 128 MB minimum and 1536 maximum, and I have my temporary internet files set to be stored there to reduce fragmentation on my Windows partition.)
E: = MS Flight = 5 GB (my dad plays MS flight, and I gave it it's own partition so it wouldn't get fragmented and load slow for him)
F: = Games = 20 GB (I put all my games here, BF1942, Ghost Recon, SoF2, TES3: Morrowind, CS, etc.
G: = Storage = 80 GB (this is a separate hard drive I use for storage when I download installation programs like updates to game, benchmark utilities, and also where I keep my entire CD collection in MP3 form)

*EDIT* With it set up like this I defragment the C: drive about every other month, and it takes no more than 5 minutes to defrag it. I defrag my other partitions when I install a new game, or ad a bunch of music to my MP3 collection.

Drives C - F are partitions on my Raptor, G is a WD800JB