Hi, Old Guy. (I'll be 69 tomorrow; is that old enough?)
Welcome to WinXP! I think you'll love it - after you shift from the
MS-DOS-based mindset. ;^}
While a lot of WinXP looks the same as Win9x/ME, there are major differences
under the hood. One of the big advances is Disk Management. It can handle
all the jobs that we used to do with FDISK and Format.com, plus it will
change drive letter assignments, which we did by using the Device Manager in
Win9x/ME. The Help file reached from Disk Management is worth exploring; it
explains a lot of hard drive mysteries.
One thing that hasn't changed, though, is that WinXP - just like Win9x/ME
and other operating systems - will not obey an order to "commit suicide" or
to saw off the limb it's sitting on. So, if you need to format drive C:,
you'll have to boot from something other than Drive C:. In Win9x/ME, we
used an MS-DOS boot floppy when we wanted to run FDISK or format C:. In
WinXP, we boot from the WinXP CD-ROM, which has the tools to create, delete
or format partitions on our HD, including Drive C:.
But nothing in WinXP's toolkit will shrink an existing partition. Since
your original Drive C: uses the whole hard drive (unless Dell has a hidden
partition?), you have just two ways to split it into multiple partitions:
1. Backup; repartition; reformat; restore, or
2. Use Partition Magic or another third-party utility.
If you choose the first method, you can use the tools on the WinXP CD-ROM to
do the repartitioning. But, as Mike Powers advised, be sure to check with
Dell about any quirks in the OEM version of WinXP on your computer.
RC
