Aces High Bulletin Board

General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Octavius on September 11, 2002, 10:26:52 PM

Title: Western Digital 80GB arrives
Post by: Octavius on September 11, 2002, 10:26:52 PM

...and all is right in the world.   First attempt at changing a hard drive and setting the old/new to a master/slave setup is successfull.  I bought a Western Digital Caviar 80GB 7200rpm 8MB buffer ATA/100.

One problem with partitioning... after installing, I booted off the Win XP CD and formatted using the utility on the disk.  I was not given the option of using FAT32 partition style.  I don't know much about partitioning and the logistics... but the only option I was given was an NTFS file system with one huge chunky partition of the whole 80gb.  I'd certainly like to chop it up, but how do i go about doing that without reformating and starting all over?  Are there any programs other than Partition Magic ($60) that will partition the drive after the installation of an OS?

Thanks in advance,

oct

Title: Western Digital 80GB arrives
Post by: Animal on September 12, 2002, 12:17:50 AM

You will love it. I have the 100GB version and its very fast.
As for Fat32, if you want that, you will have to partition with FDISK

Title: Western Digital 80GB arrives
Post by: bloom25 on September 12, 2002, 06:38:57 PM

If you are using winXP or win2k just have it as a large NTFS partition.  FAT32 has a 4 GB file size limitation and is less efficient and a bit slower than NTFS.  NTFS also has other benefits that I don't have time to get into.

The only downside is that DOS programs cannot see NTFS partitions, that means things like Norton Ghost won't work.

Title: Western Digital 80GB arrives
Post by: Octavius on September 12, 2002, 06:45:04 PM

So its ok to have one large NTFS chunk?  If the positives outweigh the negatives then I'll leave it as is.