PC Hacks

Hack #85. Make a Bare Disk Bootable

The original PC hard drive partitioning software comes with each Microsoft operating system—either as the DOS FDISK.EXE program or the installation and disk management utilities with Windows NT, 2000, and XP. Creating multiple partitions with FDISK can be a tedious and slow process that requires deliberate planning and keeping track of your work as you work your way through the process. Once you have completed the partitioning processes with FDISK, you then need to format each partition's filesystem or let the operating system installation process do that for you.

If you are setting up to multiboot to DOS or Windows 9x by adding Windows NT, 2000, or XP, you need only establish the first system partition and format it with DOS: the Windows setup processes take care of partitioning and formatting themselves, making the rest of the process much easier.

Complete documentation for FDISK can be found at Microsoft's web site at http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/q255/8/67.asp). Additional tips for FDISK and alternative partitioning utilities can be found at http://www.fdisk.com/fdisk/.

The basics of partitioning are:

• Determine how much space you want to allocate for the primary DOS/Windows 9x partition, which will be the foundation for multibooting using Windows's capabilities or a third-party boot utility. Two to four GB should be enough to hold the operating system and critical files for a few games.

• It is not necessary to use FDISK to ...