Install a second hard drive-the introduction
When you decide to install a second hard drive there are many issues that you must take account into. Presumably you have by now successfully added the hard drive itself and the BIOS has recognized it. As stated before there are some problems when trying to install a second hard drive or really large dimensions. I am talking here about hard drives with more than 140 gigs of space. To bypass this problem you can try to update your BIOS software, but you must be aware that this might not work all the time. If this step fails you should consider upgrading the computer itself and by this I mean a radical upgrade involving the purchase of a motherboard which can withstand such storage capacities. This is why in the auto detecting procedure you should keep a sharp eye to see if your computer detects your hard drive correctly, if it does not you are in trouble. No matter if you are using Windows 98, Windows ME or Windows XP you must also remember that the FAT32 file system does not support partitions larger than 32 gigs. If you are using Windows XP this is not that much of a problem as you can safely use the NTFS file system which does not have such restrictions, on the other hand though if you still want to use the good old FAT32 you should undergo the additional task of creating the partitions that respect this restriction. When creating partitions it is better to use percentages instead of raw space to create them because it is fairly easy this way to use all the available space. For example if you install a second hard drive of let's say 200 gigs and you decide to use FAT32 you should create 6 partitions of 15 percent each (that's about 30 gigs each) and one additional partition of 10 percent (roughly 20 gigs). You will thus manage to use all the available space. I know that 7 additional partitions might seem much and they actually are. If you decide to use NTFS you can partition your brand new hard drive just about any way you can think of. Be ready for a time consuming task, because you see partitioning is not exactly the most user friendly task, not if you use the built in Windows tools at least. There are some other software programs that can help you on this matter, notably Partition Magic which I have found to be very useful and with a lot more additional goodies than your built in partitioning tools, but if you want to really know how to use these tools read the next chapter.
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