Exercise 3 - Partitioning and formatting hard discs

In this exercise you will partition a 4 GB hard disc to smaller partitions and format it to use FAT32 file system. Operating system will be installed in another exercise later on.

1. Start the demonstration computer using Windows 98 boot disc. Windows 98 boot disc is used as the FDISK of the earlier versions cannot create partitions bigger than 2 GB.
2. Try to switch to drive C (combination SHIFT-Ö will give the colon (:)). You should get an error message like this:

   Invalid drive specification

   However, a RAMDdrive that functions as a temporary C drive is created on the memory of the computer.
3. The hard disc is not yet partitioned and there is no C drive so far. Start the FDISK program on the disc and partition the hard disc. For the options of the program see the end of this page.
   1. First FDISK asks for support for big discs. Press Y to accept.
   2. First create primary partition and set 2000 MB as its size.
   3. Then create extended partition and set all the free space left as its size.
   4. Divide the extended partition to two logical drives. The size of the first one is 1000 MB and the rest of the space is for the second one.
   5. Set the primary partition active.
   6. Then check the partitioning information. You should see partition C and logical drives D and E in the extended partition.
4. Close FDISK and restart using the floppy disc.
5. Try again to switch to the C drive. Try using DIR command for the drive C. That should not work as the C drive is not yet formatted.
6. Format the C drive using command format that is on the F drive (RAMDrive). You don't have to format other drives now.

   Format C: /S

   /S tells the format command to copy the necessary system files so that starting the computer from drive C is possible.
7. If the DIR command works now the formatting succeeded.
8. Start FDISK again and delete all logical drives and partitions in reversed order.
9. Shot down the computer and take the boot disc out.

Brief review of the FDISK options

Fixed Disk Setup Program
(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp. 1983 - 1998

FDISK Options

Current fixed disk drive: 1

Choose one of the following:

1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
2. Set active partition
3. Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive
4. Display partition information
5. Select next fixed disk

Enter choice: [1]

If there is only one hard disc, skip step 5.

For creating partitions the options are:

1. Create Primary DOS partition
2. Create Extended DOS partition
3. Create Logical Dos Drive(s)

Deleting the partitions is done in the following order:

1. Delete logical drives
2. Delete extended partition
3. Delete primary partition