How to partition a hard drive?

[Bona Fide]

My dad just got one of the HP Media Center PC's, and I was really impressed by one thing. Online, it said that there was a 200GB SATA drive, but that wasn't "really" the case. The 200GB drive (formatted to 180) had been split. 160GB was the main drive, and 20GB had been allotted for backup/restore.

My question is, how do you do that? And if you do that, and your OS corrupts, will a hard drive format erase the partitioned bit as well?

 

[w00t]

I know at the begining of windows intstall you can do it you just make a partion by pressing some key and entering its size.

 

[stevty2889]

yeah, thats something the OEM's tend to do is put the recovery partion on the hard drive, rather than including a CD. If the OS needs re-installed it's done from the recovery partition. Partions look like seperate drives, formating one doesn't format the other. Of course if the hard drive were to go bad, then your outta luck, and have to get a new one from them, which will be more expensive.

 

[Ryoga]

To a HDD manufacturer, 1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes. So 200 GB = 200,000,000,000 bytes.

In Windows (and most OSs) 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes. So the above 200,000,000,000 bytes will show up as 186 raw gigabytes or 190,734 megabytes.

Technically, the HDD manufacturers are right.

 

[madthumbs]

 

[madthumbs]

how do you do that?

Either during windows setup or using disk manager (right click on My Computer -> Manage ->Disk Management.

And if you do that, and your OS corrupts, will a hard drive format erase the partitioned bit as well?

A low level format will, but not a format *:

But lets talk about why you'd consider reformatting as I see no reason to do it when there are so many better recovery options.

 

[jlbenedict]

Originally posted by: Bona Fide
My dad just got one of the HP Media Center PC's, and I was really impressed by one thing. Online, it said that there was a 200GB SATA drive, but that wasn't "really" the case. The 200GB drive (formatted to 180) had been split. 160GB was the main drive, and 20GB had been allotted for backup/restore.

My question is, how do you do that? And if you do that, and your OS corrupts, will a hard drive format erase the partitioned bit as well?

HP should have included a recovery disc, which is a special recovery disc that will access the hidden (restore) partition and restore the larger, boot partition to its "out of the box" configuration. My nephews HP had this as well.. The restore partition was not even accessable by Windows Explorer, or at least the contents were not.. they were hidden.. hence, the recovery disc is needed..

 

[Bona Fide]

Originally posted by: madthumbs

how do you do that?

Either during windows setup or using disk manager (right click on My Computer -> Manage ->Disk Management.

And if you do that, and your OS corrupts, will a hard drive format erase the partitioned bit as well?

A low level format will, but not a format *:

But lets talk about why you'd consider reformatting as I see no reason to do it when there are so many better recovery options.

Well what I meant was that if it came to that...but you seem to be implying that there's nothing bad enough to warrant a format...are there any other options when the OS corrupts?

 

[ElFenix]

Originally posted by: Bona Fide

Well what I meant was that if it came to that...but you seem to be implying that there's nothing bad enough to warrant a format...are there any other options when the OS corrupts?

if the OS corrupts and you need to get data off there are a few methods. i like using knoppix to do it. you can also try a 'dirty install' of windows where you don't format the drive first. it doesn't result in lower performance, just some extra space taken up.

i imagine that using the recovery partition method would wipe whatever is on that main partition.

 

[madthumbs]

are there any other options when the OS corrupts?

There is:
Run last known good configuration
System Restore
Recovery Console
Repair (windows setup)
Install not upgrade to same diretory (automatically deletes old installation)

For this last method, you'll probably have new documents and settings folders. It's simple to figure out how to move the contents to the new folders.

RE: Knoppix -can it write to ntfs yet? (You can't repair data you can't write to).