howtodosite

If you partition your hard drive when you do a fresh install it will give you the opportunity to optimize your hard drive. In the article below, we will create 3 separate partitions. One for the O.S., another for your personal documents and files and the third one to use for a backup image of your drive. You can set up as many as you like if you like, but for sake of this article we will keep it simple. The big advantages of this set up is that if you would need to reinstall your O.S. later because of an upgrade or possible corruption of your operating system from a virus you will not have to reformat the entire drive erasing your files in the process. Another benefit is with a copy of the drive image stored on the third partition you can easily restore it and be back up and running in minutes without having to do a complete reinstall. Before you proceed with this procedure, make sure all of your data is backed up since you will be reformatting the entire drive this time.

1.) Insert the installation CD in the drive and reboot. You will see a screen prompt saying “Press any key to boot from CD” press enter. When prompted press F8 to accept the Windows License agreement. You will be asked if you want to repair your existing Windows XP installation, press escape to continue with a fresh install. You will the seethe screen saying “setup is inspecting your computer’s hardware configuration”.
Note: You will be asked to press F6 if you need to install a third party Raid or SCSI driver. If you are using an IDE Hard Drive, then you do not need to press F6.

2.) At the setup screen you will be presented with three options. 1. To setup XP on the selected space. 2. Create a partition in the unpartitioned space. 3. Delete the selected partition.
Provided you have backed up all your files select the third option to delete the partition and follow the screen prompts.

3.) Once the partition has been deleted you will see your available disc space displayed. For our example we will assume you have an 80 GB hard drive and plan to install some additional software. Select “C” to set up a new partition and make the size 10 GB. Repeat this step twice more to set up a partition for your files ( 45GB) and the third one for back up image on the remaining space.

4.) Now you will see a list of the partitions you have created. Select “C” and press enter to proceed with the new installation. When prompted choose to format the partition using “NTFS”. This will take a few minutes and you can continue with the new install.

5.) Once your operating system and all the necessary drivers have been installed click, Start, My Computer, and right click on each of the two additional partitions and choose, Format. Select “NTFS and press OK. When finished you are almost there. You just have to move your “My documents folder to the new partition. By default it’s on “C”. Click, start, My documents, properties and select move. Navigate to the new location and select move. For detailed instructions on this step go Here.

6.) This step is optional. Install a good backup program like Acronis True Image and create a copy of your “C” partition and store it on your third partition. With the help of a boot CD that Acronis helps you create you will be able to reinstall that image in minutes and your system will be good as new if needed. Note: Acronis has an older version available that is free and is an excellent choice. (Do not defragment this third partition where the copy of your image resides. This may corrupt it and it will be useless when you need it.)

Related articles:

How To Prevent Data Loss
How to Move The My Documents Folder in Windows
How to Improve Your Computer Security
How to Access The Windows Administrator Account- XP and Vista
How to Change The Desktop Icon Size in Windows XP