Understanding Partitions?

A while back I was on the phone trying to get some help for a problem I was having. The tech person wanted me to make a partition. So I did it, grudingly. I knew the problem had to do with my OS install disk. I was trying to reformat at the time and an error happened when it tried to read the disk.

Thankfully the second time I called I got someone WHO KNEW what they were doing and listened to me. Sent me a new OS disk.. everything went swimmingly after that.

ANYWAY. I'm about to do another format, since its been a while. And I'm trying to understand partitions... It's not clicking. What I'd like to do is only have one partition, and get rid of the one that tech person had me make.

I downloaded the partition manager program on this site. It found 3.

FAT16 54.88 mb Status: none
NTFS 144.21 gb with system status
FAT32 4.74 gb status: none

I assume NTFS is my main one with my current OS. (XP)

This may sound stupid, but I'm dummy over partitions. Is it safe for me to delete FAT32 and FAT16? Should I do it before or after reformatting? Does it matter?

Thanks in advance!

 

I would hesitate to remove the fat16 partition as the size and type point to it being a PC manufacturer partition. Is it a DELL?

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Partitions are just a way of dividing up a HD into separate spaces. Think of a filing cabinet that you store in the garage. If you have three drawers and keep the OS in the top one and documents in the second one and music in the third one, you you get a level of safety if something goes wrong. Say you leave the top drawer open and a bunch of mice move in and chew up your OS. You can clean out the top drawer and repair the OS knowing the bulk of your documents and music are safe in the other two drawers. If you had kept everything in the top drawer then it would have all been chewed up. So partitions can be good but you have to use them to separate your different types of data.

If there has been a fire in the garage then the whole filing cabinet (HD) would be damaged so partitions won't do you much good in the case of HD failure.

If you aren't going to use the partitions then just make the one. I would keep the 55mb one since the space is negligible on a 150gb drive and it may contain troubleshooting information.

 

If you are going to format,save anything you want to keep to an external source,an external hard drive is best but you can save to dvd if you wish, and then when you format it will automatically remove all partitions from the hard drive and you will be able to select the partitions you want during the formatting procedure.

 

Thanks all. I decided to just leave them alone.

Yes it is a Dell. I figured the one was the factory settings partition so I left it be. I'm not going to mess with anything.