Format second hard drive- mission complete
When you buy a second hard drive, it is easier to format it according to your needs as you won't have to deal with those boot diskettes or CDs. This chapter will show you how to create and further on format second hard drive for both Windows XP and Windows 98. In Windows XP the task is very easy and straightforward. What you should ask yourself is on what purposes you will use this hard drive of yours. If you need it for let's say storage you can safely make a single NTFS partition without much hassle, if on the other hand you intend to use it as a carrier FAT32 should be your choice as it will ensure compatibility with older Windows versions such as Windows 98 or Windows Millennium. If FAT32 is your choice then you should always remember that the maximum partition size allowable is of 32 gigabytes, so it is very likely that you will need to make more than one partition. If on the other hand you are using Windows 98 or Windows ME you should reboot your computer and start in MS-DOS. From this point on you can use the FDISK command to create or delete partitions and the FORMAT command to properly format the new ones. This of course assumes that you will first need to create partitions. If the partitions are already there, you can quite easily format them in Windows by right clicking the drive and then selecting format. From there check the "Quick format" checkbox and simply hit Format afterwards. You should keep in mind when you decide to format second hard drive that this action is quite drastic and all the data found on that drive will be gone. There are alternatives to these methods though: Partition Magic will allow you to merge, split, enlarge or shrink partitions without any data loss, so I recommend this piece of software if what you are after is a simple resize operation. Any other alternative is better than a format. One big exception on which I actually recommend formatting is that very rare situation when you want to get rid of a partition which is terribly infested with viruses and spyware. The sad fact is that although almost all the viruses can be cleaned, spyware is much more resilient and sometimes such drastic measures can be used with great effect. Another instance in which you might legitimately want to format a hard drive is the case in which you bought it second hand and still has the data from its previous user. I consider this as a matter of courtesy.
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