Format Logical Partitions?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ol'ornrycus²
  • Start date Start date
O

Ol'ornrycus²

This one has me stumped. In a fresh installation of XP Pro, after
setting the size of my C, D & E partitions, I format C in NTFS,
then the setup starts with no chance to format D & E. So, after
XP is all setup, I format the two logicals with NTFS but they are
now F & G because the CDs took D and E. So I have to change
the drive letters around. Is there some way to format all three
partitions during setup, BEFORE setup commences installing
the OS? TIA
 
Format them is dos.

or

Start setup, format drive, exit setup, start setup, format drive, exit
setup, start setup, format drive, continue with install.

(you may still have to change the drive letters though, this does not
guarantee that xp will not make the cd drives d and e)
 
Roger that. I've done the start - format, start -format thing and figured there
must be a better way. When I format in DOS with a 98 boot disk I can
only get Fat32, unless I'm missing something...which is highly likely.
 
from the wonderful said:
This one has me stumped. In a fresh installation of XP Pro, after
setting the size of my C, D & E partitions, I format C in NTFS,
then the setup starts with no chance to format D & E. So, after
XP is all setup, I format the two logicals with NTFS but they are
now F & G because the CDs took D and E.
Click to expand...

So why not change the CDs to F & G (or better yet, X and Y) =before= you
format the other partitions? That's what I do - as soon as the system is
bootable, I move the optical drive letters =way= up out of the way of
anything that might get plugged in later.
 
True, you can only get fat32 in dos, but the xp setup will convert the c to
ntfs(if you tell it to), then once windows boots you can convert the others.
I usually just make my partitions with fdisk and format c. Then install xp
on c going to ntfs during setup. Then when windows boots I use the xp disk
management tool to format and set the drive letters for the other
partitions.
 
Thanks PH and GSV. The changing of drive letters is probably no big deal,
but it would have been nice if they would pause setup long enough to properly
set up a hard drive...to avoid the hassle.

And I can
 
This one has me stumped. In a fresh installation of XP Pro, after
setting the size of my C, D & E partitions,
Click to expand...

This is where you're going wrong. The reality is when you created the
three partitions, the drive letters assigned to them were C:, F:, and
G:, which you could visually confirm by looking more closely at the
partition screen. At this point, if you're not satisfied with the
drive assignments, exit the installation using F3 and restart it. The
partitions would then be C:, D:, and E:.
 
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