Drive Partitions

foxracing5270

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Hi I am wondering what partitions are and how do I know if I have any? I plan on reformatting the computer (I don't have backup disks but I made a start up disk) and I am not sure whether I will only have to reformat C or not.
 
You can create partitions using the FDISK utility assuming that it was copied over to your startup disk. Double click on the floppy to see if a FDISK and FORMAT is in there. You can get a glimpse if you have multiple partitions or not by going into My Computer or if you have Windows Vista, go into Computer.

Right click on your hard drive icon and go down to properties. If a single volume is using up all your hard drive space and no other volume exist, then you only have one single partition on your hard drive. If you reformat your PC, it is a good time to set them up. It helps to organize files better, make backup easier, in some ways faster. Windows XP CD also has their own partitions manager that will allow you to set up partitions during the installation.
 
Partitions are sections of your hard disk(s) which have been separated from each other, basically. They are useful if for example, your operating system gets screwed up and you saved your files on a different partition to the OS, as they should be left intact.

Paragon's Partition Manager is a good program which I used recently to resize one of my partitions. It performs operations in Windows and does them very quickly in most cases.
 
Speaking of partitioning software, did you guys know that PowerQuest and Norton are merged together?!?! Holy cow, I was like WTF. Why was there a Norton Partition Magic and also another Partition Magic that PowerQuest had out. I was thinking, lawsuit between the two company. But now that Norton acquired the rights to PowerQuest, it's ok.
 
Yeah, I read about it the other day. See, I have PowerQuest Partition Magic on 2 floppies and I needed to resize one of my partitions the other day on my laptop. Problem is that my laptop doesn't have an FDD, so when I went to download it...yup, I found out.

Thanks for the info, btw, Corolla, I was wondering why there appeared to be two Partition Magics around.
 
Yeah, it was confusing as hell. If you go here http://www.powerquest.com/ , you'll see that it links to Symantec's site and has a simple explanation of what happened. It's still kind of confusing as to which software to get though. I mean, there's Nortons version and I still see PowerQuests new version floating around too. I just know that Partition Magic is one of the best program to use when it comes to altering hard drive partitions.
 
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