CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [189]
Your hard drive is the bar that says Disk 0 Unallocated Space, which is currently the only thing there. If you just click Next, Windows automatically partitions and formats the drive for you, but I still fail to see any fun in that, so let’s once again manually create a partition on the drive. Click the Drive options (advanced) button to see the advanced drive features. To create a new partition, click the New button. You could simply click Apply to make a 200-GB partition, but to demonstrate one of Vista’s handy new features, type 100000 and then click Apply (Figure 12-39).
Once you have created your 100-GB partition, click the Format button. Notice that the installer never asks you what file system to use. Vista can read FAT drives, but it will not install itself to one by default. There are, of course, some people on the Internet who have figured out how to install Vista to a FAT32 drive, but why anyone would want to lose all of NTFS’s functionality is beyond me.
Figure 12-37 Choose your edition
So now you have set up a 100-GB partition, but what if you want to make it a 200-GB partition? In XP, you would have to delete the partition and start over, but not so in Vista. You can simply click the Extend button and then apply the rest of the unallocated space to your currently formatted partition. The extend function allows you to easily tack unpartitioned space onto an already partitioned drive.
Multiple Partitions
You can format a drive to contain two partitions just as easily as formatting a single drive. Just as in the XP example, you’ll be creating three 66-GB partitions. Unlike in Windows XP, this process actually leaves you with three primary partitions, not a primary partition and an extended partition with two logical drives. Vista will not create extended partitions if a user has fewer than four partitions on a drive, so if you’re making three partitions, you’re actually creating three primary partitions. If you made a fourth, it would manifest itself as a logical drive on an extended partition.
Figure 12-38 The Vista partitioning page
However, you’re not going to create four partitions for this exercise, so you don’t need to worry about that. You’ll start out, again, with a 200-GB drive, but this time, after clicking the New button, type 66666 into the Size box and click Apply. That will give you a 66-GB (more or less) primary partition (Figure 12-40).
Do the same thing to create the next two drives and you’re finished. That was pretty easy, wasn’t it?
Partitions and Drive Letters
So you have a hard drive, maybe several hard drives, all partitioned up, and you’ve installed Windows on one of them, but where do those drive letters come from? Older systems assigned drive letters based on some fairly complicated rules having to do with master and slave drives, but things are much simpler on modern systems.
The primary active partition will always be C: and you can’t change that, but the rest of the drives are assigned the next available letter, with hard drives taking priority over optical drives. If you have two hard drives and an optical drive in your computer, the hard drives will be C: and D:, and the optical drive will be E:. If, however, you later install another hard drive in the computer, it will become your F: drive. Newly installed drives do not take drive letters from previously installed drives.
Figure 12-39 Setting partition size
You can change the lettering on every drive but your system partition, which you’ll find out how to do in the next section.
Disk Management
The real tool for partitioning and formatting is the Disk Management utility. You can use Disk Management to do everything you want to do to a hard drive in one handy tool. You can access Disk Management by going to the Control Panel and opening the Computer Management applet. If you’re cool, you can click Start