Partition Nightmare

My Geeky friends, I am in Way over my head.


Since my friend has a big hard drive I thought it would be a good thing to partition it. That way he could have xp on C drive and his data elsewhere. I also wanted to put deep freeze on the computer. I would freeze the C drive and leave D drive for him to put his personal files he wanted to keep.

I could not figure out how to partition, So I asked my brother to help me. He has done it lots of times. So he put in a knoppix disk and did something. When he was done, the computer no longer booted at all. I finally figured out that the C drive was "hidden" and got it going again.

I noticed the hdd had been partitioned, but xp did did not recognize it.

I went in to Easeus partition manager and formated the other 3 partitions with fat 32. Easus gave them drive letters E, F and G.

ok fine.

But XP still cant see them.


While brother was working on the xp, I tried to do it on Windows 7. Nope, did not succeed. I had to completley recover windows 7 to get it working again. I still do not have other drives that windows 7 can see either.

Why is this so hard??????


I really want to learn to do this as I have about 7 more computers I want to put deep freeze on.

Can some one help me with baby steps on how to do this?


Pete22

 

In XP, right-click My Computer>choose Manage>in left pane select Disk Management what does the graph show for partitions?

 

It's quite simple really, install XP with a choice of how big you want to make it. Windows apps and games like to load into C and take up tons of space. After you decide that, install XP clean and after it's all installed then create your partitions in disk manager. Best way to do it but the Knoppix disk should work too.:confused BTW, XP will only expand into an empty space on the right if you're going to try that.

EDIT: You could try a fixboot /mbr and see what happens from the repair option..

 

I have taken a picture of what it looks like.

And I just checked explorer and XP now SEEs these Drives. That is wonderful but.... how do I do it again?????????

See my next post.

 

Yes augie this will work if I was starting from scratch, which I am on some of the machines, but not on others.

I did try this on both the xp and the windows 7 but it did not work. Not sure why. I wonder if the problem with knoppix was the extra large hdd???? Very weird results.
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Now to do this on the rest of the machines some with systems, some without.

If operating system is aready installed:

I first shrink the space for the operating system. I can use easus Partition manager to do that. Then add other partitions.
Next, go in to Windows disk manger to format the drive space.
Windows will then give each partition a drive name.

Is this right?


If Xp is not already installed:
Tell windows how much space it can use. How do I do that?

Then follow the same directions as above?


Oh and how do I keep windows from hiding all the drives so it will not boot like happened on one computer? I recall it had something to do with the hard drive size but I forgot how I fixed it. :confused :-o


Thanks for helping me through this.

Pete22