Q:\> Why Do You Need To Partition A Hard Drive?
A:\> Basically out of the box, hard drives are completely blank. Because of the many different options available, they don't come pre-configured for any particular systems, reason why they don't in a system right out of the box. Although you can gets hard drives in any sizes, you can actually split, or partition, a hard drive into many smaller drives. People do this for many reasons, which is all about personal preference in terms of organization, but for the most part, keeping the drive in a whole, single partition is how the large majority of people have them setup. Once the partition is created, than it is ready to be formatted. But if there is no partition created, the drive will not be visible.

Q:\> Partitioning a Hard Drive in Windows XP
A:\> Unlike Windows 95, 98 or ME, Windows XP does not come with a "Start Up Disk" or "Boot Disk", but fortunately Windows XP has the tool built in and necessary to get a 2nd hard drive up and running. The following steps are no different if the hard drive was installed inside the computer, or in an external case. Windows treats them all the same

First of all, right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage"

Now, select the "Disk Management" option

Once you've selected "Disk Management", you should see a "Disk 1" (it may be a different number depending if you have more than 1 storage drive, optical drives like CD/DVD burners excluded.).

Computers in this situation start counting at 0, so a second drive will be "Disk 1". The new, blank hard drive will be marked at "Unallocated". In this case, we are working with a blank 30GB hard drive (marked as 28.63GB). If you can't find a second "Unallocated" hard drive listed, than it's safe to assume that the hard drive's not connected properly.

So to get started on creating a new partition, right-click on the box where is says "Unallocated" and select "New Partition...".

When you select the "New Partition..." option, you'll start the "New Partition Wizard". Click next to start the wizard

Next you'll want to create a "Primary Partition". There are a few exceptions for when you'll want to create an Extended Partition with a Logical Drive (they work together), but those are options for more experienced computer users.

Next it will ask you what size you want to partition the hard drive. Of course you're going to want to use the maximum size of the hard drive. As I mentioned earlier, they round up hard drives sizes. As you can see the hard drive size is listed at 29322MB's, which equals 29.322GB, rounded up to 30GB. (1GB=1000MB; Not quite. This is explained in more details at the bottom of page, but we'll stick with this for ease of understanding)

So just leave it at default since Windows XP assumes that you'll want to use the whole hard drive, and click next.

Next it asks what drive letter you want the drive to be. Now, the computer this was done on, the last drive was F (yes, we had a lot of drives) so G is the next letter available. Depending on the machine, your starting letter will be different, but you can choose any of them from the list, it will make no difference on functionality, just personal preference and organization. If you do not feel comfortable with choosing a drive letter, you may also choose "Do not assign a drive letter or drive path". The easiest it just to leave it at the default letter, or don't assign a drive letter, and hit next.

So now that you've created the partition, you now need to format it. Depending on the size of the hard drive, you may or may not get both the "FAT32" and "NTFS" options. FAT32 is not available for hard drives large than 60GB. Ideally you'll want to stick to NTFS. NTFS was designed for NT based operating systems like Windows NT4, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. The downfall with NTFS is that Windows 9x (Windows 95, 98 & ME) cannot read NTFS, so unless the hard drive will be physically plugged into a Windows 9x computer (like inside the computer or through a USB bay), it's not something to worry about. Windows XP can work with both FAT32 and NTFS. With Windows 9x systems being basically obsolete, there should be little worries about choosing NTFS.

On the next step, leave "Allocation unit size" at it's default setting.

"Volume label" is just a name for the partition. You can call it whatever you want, like "Applications", "My Music", "Games" or the like. It's the name you'll see when you open up My Computer. You can even leave it at it's default, or even blank. You can easily change the name later under the hard drive's properties at any time and as frequently as you wish.

After you select the NTFS option, there will be 2 options associated with NTFS; the "Perform a quick format" and "Enable file and folder compression". For a hard drive's first format, it's usually a good idea to not do a quick format. Not only does it make sure that it's been formatted correctly, but also it'll check the drive as it goes to make sure it does not have any bad sectors or if it's a defective drive. However, there is no hard in doing a quick format. A regular "long" format can take a significant amount of time, and times increases at the size of the drives increases. Because it can take a long time, the majority of people will perform a quick format.

Compression is something you really never want to do. It'll give you more hard drive space by compressing the data, but it will slow down your performance. Most hard drive are more than large enough to store most people's data, and they are really cheap now, it's not worth the slowdowns and headaches.

So hit next, leaving the "Perform a quick format" and "Enable file and folder compression" options unchecked. Then hit "Finish" and it will start to perform all your settings.

It took about 15 minutes for the partitioning and formatting of the 30GB hard drive, so it may take longer with larger drives and also depends on the speed of the computer itself. During this process, you don't want to turn off the computer. It's not really bad for the drive, it's just that you'll need to redo the whole process again.

And once it's finished, we now have a healthy 28.63GB partition called "New Volume" (I left the "Volume label" at the default name), as drive "G", ready to be used

Q:\> Gigabyte (GB), Megabyte (MB), Kilobytes (KB) and Bytes
A:\> Computer's storage units don't function on even number like the metric system, but still use the same type of prefix structure (Kilo, Mega, Giga). Because the way computer's work with and store information, they actually work in multiples of 2 to the power of 8 (2^8). But computer math aside, it essentially comes down to 1024Bytes=1KB, 1024KB=1MB, 1024MB=1GB, 1024GB=1TB, etc...