Hi, Sam.
FDISK (and Format.exe) are history. They are part of our MS-DOS past.
WinXP is not built on MS-DOS and has better ways of doing such things as
partitioning and formatting.
First, boot into WinXP and find Disk Management, the built-in utility that
debuted in Win2K. The quickest way there is to type at the Run prompt:
diskmgmt.msc
Once in DM, study the screen AND the Help file. It tells more about hard
disks and file systems than most of us ever knew before, even if we've been
using Windows for years. You can click View and arrange the screen to suit
yourself; I prefer the Volume List in the top and the Graphical View on the
bottom.
When you are comfy with Disk Management, use it to create a partition,
assign it a "drive" letter, and format it. As with any x86 computer, you
can have up to four partitions, of which one can be an extended partition
holding one or more logical drives. The extended partition does not get a
drive letter and can't be formatted, but each primary partition and each
logical drive within the extended partition is a "volume". Each volume is
assigned a drive letter and can be formatted to your choice of NTFS or a
version of FAT. Unless you plan to install Win9x/ME on this computer, go
with NTFS all the way. NTFS is more secure, both in the sense of security
from unauthorized access and in the sense of security from hard disk
failures. MS has imposed one restriction: WinXP will not format a >32 GB
volume as FAT32; if you insist on using FAT on a large (up to about 127 GB)
volume you will have to use MS-DOS and Format.exe, after which WinXP will
happily use the whole volume.
Another limitation shared by all operating systems is that it cannot format
the volume that it just booted from. Even in MS-DOS days, we had to boot
from a floppy to partition the HD or to format Drive C:. As you will see in
the DM Help file, the same limitations apply to WinXP. You will need to
boot from another device (such as the CD/DVD drive) to format the "system
partition" (almost always Drive C
or the "boot volume" (which holds
\Windows, the boot folder; it may be Drive C: or some other volume). Disk
Management will tell you which volume is "(System)" and which is "(Boot)".
And, while DM can create, delete and recreate volumes, it cannot resize one.
So, if you've already created a single 80 GB volume on your 80 GB HD, then
yes, you'll have to reboot from the WinXP CD-ROM and start over. Choose a
clean install and this time, tell Setup what size you want Drive C: to be.
If you want to install WinXP somewhere other than C:, this is the time to
create and format that second volume, too. Any other volumes can be created
by DM after WinXP is running.
Then you can throw away your Win9x/ME boot floppy, or at least hide it, so
that you won't be tempted to use it again. ;^}
RC
