Prepare the Hard Drive

There is one last step to peform before installing the operating system and proceeding to the business of actually using your newly-built computer system. Before your computer can use a hard drive, the drive must be formatted and partitioned. This step is actually not completely separate from operating system installation, since how you will format and partition your hard drive depends heavily on which operating system you will be using.

When formatting a hard drive, you must know what type of filesystem will be used for your operating systems. Partitions are a way of logically dividing the physical space on the hard drive; a separate filesystem can be used in each partition. When a partition is created under a Microsoft operating system, it is assigned a drive latter followed by a colon; 'C:' for example is the drive letter corresponding to the boot partition. Any further partitions you will create on the hard drive will have subsequent drive letters. Note that this process is complicated when there is more than one hard drive in the system.

If you are installing a Microsoft operating system such as Windows XP, you must decide between the FAT32 and NTFS filesystems. NTFS is the newer of the two and flaunts some advantages over FAT32 but you may experience compatibility issues if you go with NTFS. If you want to use NTFS, our suggestion is to also have a partition formatted for the FAT32 filesystem so that if you run across any applications that won't run on NTFS, you can install them on the FAT32 partition. NTFS and FAT32 seem completely compatible with one another under Windows XP. If you are installing some other operating system such as Linux, you will probably be using the ext3 filesystem, but you should consult the documentation available for your operating system to determine how to proceed.

How you actually proceed with formatting and partitioning the hard drive depends on the operating system. With versions of operating systems now available, you should be able to boot directly from CD or floppy disk and be presented automatically with options on how to format the hard drive. Microsoft's method is 'fdisk', which you can generally type at a command prompt to bring up the utility allowing you to partition and format the hard drive.

Whatever operating system you are using, we recommend using more than just a single partition. Many people are tempted to create a single huge C: drive, but if you should ever wish to reformat that drive in case the operating system becomes unstable (which happens often enough) you will lose any other data you have accumulated. Having multiple partitions allows you to keep sensitive data on the extended partitions so that if you need to reinstall your operating system you can simply reformat the entire C: drive and only lose non-essential data.

After formatting and partitioning the hard drive you are finally ready to install the operating system.