Welcome to bratlady.com --Preparing Your Hard Drive for a Windows Operating System

Preparing Your Hard Drive for an Operating System

CONFIGURE THE DRIVE IN CMOS

   First, you'll need to tell your system what type of drive it is dealing with so it will access it properly. You should have the drive correctly jumpered and installed in the drive bay. If you haven't, go to Drives and Cables. To acces your computer's BIOS, on most PC's you either hit the delete or F1 key while booting---right after the memory count. If you are unsure how to enter CMOS, consult your motherboard manual.

Note: Be extremely careful when making changes in CMOS, as you could potentially render your PC unbootable!

   On most computers, it's best to set the drive on "auto" in the basic settings category. If it's your only hard drive, we'll assume it's a primary master; this is what you would set to "auto". If it's a second drive on the same cable as the primary drive, it would be the "primary slave", etc.
   Then go into the section that says "hard drive auto detect" or something similar, and let the computer configure it. It should correctly set the heads, cylinders, etc. optimally for the drive.
   Once this is done, save (usually F10) it to CMOS and exit.
BOOT ORDER

If your computer isn't set to boot from a floppy disk (you can tell by the floppy drive light coming on, and you'll hear the computer talking to the drive if it's configured to look for it), you'll need to go back into CMOS and check the order in which the drives boot, depending on which media you'll be using to boot the computer to install the operating system. If you're going to boot from a floppy disk, you'll want to set drive a: (assuming drive a is your floppy drive) to boot first. If you'll be booting from a CD-ROM, you'll set it first. An alternate way is to set the floppy drive first (it will only boot from it if there's a disk in the drive), then the CD-ROM drive, then the first hard drive. In this scenario, the computer will look for a disk in the floppy drive first, and if there's a bootable disk in the drive, it will boot from that. If not, it looks next for a bootable cd in the CD-ROM drive, and if there's one there it will boot from that. If not, then it boots from your first hard drive. That's actually a safe way to leave it, and takes very little extra boot time.
PARTITION AND FORMAT THE DRIVE

If you will be installing a Windows-based system, you'll need to partition your hard drive before you can use it. The size, number, and filesystem types of partitions you create are entirely up to you. If you're planning on installing a multi-boot system, with Linux and Windows 98, for example, you would definitely want to install Windows first. In order to do this, you'd have to create a FAT (most likely FAT 32) partition and at least one non-dos partition for Linux. (Newer versions of Linux are able to re-partition a FAT partition to create an ext-2 filesystem, but it's safer to create it from DOS first.) You could also create a small non-DOS partition for your LInux swap file, but it's not really necessary at this time, unless you know exactly what you want and are familiar with Linux.
To start the fdisk program, you need to boot from either a floppy disk or a bootable CD so the system boots cleanly. Operating system software almost always comes with a floppy boot disk and/or bootable CD-ROM supplied. But if for some reason you don't have one, read below about how to create one.
To create a Windows 95/98 Startup disk:
1. Format a floppy disk and then click on Start/ Settings/ Control Panel/ Add Remove Programs/ Startup Disk.
2. After the process is finished, push up the plastic notch on the disk to write-protect it.
To create a boot disk from DOS:
1. Format a floppy disk with the command format a: /s or format a: /sys.
2. Copy the files format.com and fdisk.exe to the floppy disk.
3. If necessary, copy the drivers for your CD-ROM drive to the floppy, along with the mscdex.exe file.
  Note: If you'll be booting from your CD-ROM drive to install the operating system and/or to run fdisk, you won't need the floppy.
To partition the drive:

Once you have booted the computer from either a CD or a floppy disk, you'll type fdisk at the command prompt.

Follow the prompts on the screen---it's pretty self-explanatory.
If you're going to be installing Linux or another non-DOS operating system, you'll want to also create a non-DOS partition
Keep in mind that with each additional partition you create, you'll be adding another drive letter. This will cause your present CD-ROM drive letters to be advanced, as they come after hard drive letters.
You MUST reboot after partitioning, and BEFORE formatting the drive.
If you make a mistake, you can safely repeat the fdisk process before rebooting.
ALL data on the partitions that you are deleting or changing will be lost!

To format the drive:

Once you have rebooted after the partitioning process, you will want to type format c: (if C: is the drive that you want to format) or format d: (if the drive you want to format is either a second drive or a second partition). You'll follow the prompts until done. REMEMBER: Formatting a drive or partition will completely erase any existing data on the drive! Always use this command with the utmost caution! If you're unsure whether or not you have the correct drive letter, you can type dir c: or dir d: (or whatever letter you want to look at) to view trhe contents of that drive or partition.
Your drive should now be ready to use!