Upgrading & Fixing Laptops DUMmIES

FAT32 all but makes drive size irrelevant, supporting drives up to 2TB — but

not smaller than 512MB. It is also more efficient in storing data, resulting in

less wasted overhead.

If you will be using Microsoft’s facilities to partition and format the drive, use

the FDISK and FORMAT utilities. Here are the steps. Note that the process can

take an hour or more.

1. Insert the Windows 98 Startup disk in the floppy disk drive and
   restart your computer.
   The startup disk displays a menu of options.


2. Choose Start Computer Without CD-ROM Support and press the
   Enter key.
   You are taken to the DOS command prompt, which is hidden beneath
   Windows 98.


3. Type FDISKand press Enter.
   If the hard drive is larger than 512MB, you are asked if you want to enable
   large disk support, which opens the door to disks with larger real or vir-
   tual drives. If you enable large disk support, the drive you partition and
   format will be inaccessible from Windows 95 and some other earlier and
   different versions of Windows.


4. At this stage, the most important option on the Fdisk menu is Create
   DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive. Select it and press Enter.


5. Press 1 to select Create Primary DOS Partition and then press Enter.

You are asked if you want to use the maximum available size for the pri-

mary DOS partition; the primary partition holds the operating system.

If you choose the FAT32 file system, you can have the entire hard drive

partitioned and formatted as a single unit, or you can divide it. If you

choose (or are forced to choose) FAT16, you have to divide the disk into

even or uneven slices no larger than 2GB each.

For a machine running Windows 98, Microsoft recommends that the

primary partition be at least 500MB to hold the operating system plus tem-

porary files. If you have defined more than one partition, make one of them

the active partition. Although more than one partition can contain boot

information for one or more operating systems, only one of them can be

active at a time — and that partition boots the operating system at startup.

You can change a partition’s status to active or inactive at any time.

6. Select the Create Extended DOS Partition option and press Enter.

Now’s when you assign drive letters to the additional space on the hard

drive. You can adjust the size of the partition or you can use the default

size. The Create Logical DOS Drive(s) in the Extended DOS Partition

272 Part V: The Software Side of Life