Laptop hard drive installation- the final touch
If you did everything right you must now have a laptop quite perfectly similar as the old one. Now of course this is not what you aimed for. You still need to put that extra space to use. There are still some hard drive installation steps you must take. From this point on you have quite a large array of alternatives depending on what operating system you have. The final steps of the hard drive installation process are extremely easy in Windows XP. Simply go to disk management and assign the extra space to a partition or if you wish partitions. If you intend to make FAT32 partitions instead of NTFS, always remember that FAT32 partitions can only be 32 gigabytes large at their maximum. I strongly recommend using the NTFS file system, it has no space limitations and will give you some extra speed due to its indexing capability. If you are running Windows 98 or Windows ME you will have to enter the MS-DOS mode and use the Fdisk utility to create new partitions and then the Format utility to make those new born partitions usable. Always use large disk support and always remember that the maximum size that a partition can have is at 32 gigabytes. I keep repeating this because I have seen many troubles arising from not following this restriction. These methods are both fine and dandy, but deprive you from a very basic facility. They don't allow to extend the current existing partitions. Don't give up though for there is hope at the horizon. Partition Magic is the name and partition resizing is the game. I'm in loved with this software. The interface is clean and easy to use, it can be run from Windows and most importantly it will protect the integrity of the data. Now this is an unbeatable combination. Further still you use this software on virtually any type of Windows, including Windows 95. Now this sort of backward compatibility is rarely found and it should be appreciated at its fullest. Now you can say that all is done. The hard drive installation is officially over. You laptop is at peak condition, with a larger storage capacity and you can safely focus on other issues. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I also hope that the final product is a laptop still holding the data from the old hard drive while at the same time having the benefits of a new hard drive.
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