Hi,

At College we went into the "advanced" settings - now on all of my machines it is F2 to get into the BIOS. Where as on these old 98SE machines we had to hit delete - which lead to the BIOS - so what is the differance between CMOS and BIOS?

Secondly, she was talking about partitoning the HDD. You know where you have it in peices. However, she was going too fast, and she just wacked the keys and said right type in FDISK and the wack another bunch of keys. So, the question is - which buttons did she press before and after entering FDISK? I'm sure on modern systems you don't have all this FDISK lark. Can someone go through the diferent types of it - as there is primary partition, external (i think) and one that begins with L.

Cheers
Alex

Personally I would never have my hard drive in pieces but that is another matter.


Fdisk, etc are old dos commands which aren't used or included with 2000/XP as they don't work from DOS. Formatting on 2000/XP is either done off the boot CD when installing the OS. or through the diskmanagement.


When you go through Fdisk on the dos, the button you press afterwards is enter. Not very helpful I know for you but true ;) Some options will come up and you choose from there.

The best way for you to learn, is to get yourself an old computer, a floppy boot disk and play around yourself.

With regards to partitions, you can make as many as you like. There is your primary partion which the OS runs, and the other partition is the extended partition. I normally create myself two partitions, one for the OS and the other for data, so I can reinstall windows happily without losing data if needs be,


Hope some of that helps.



PS:- (I have just learnt all this knowledge myself through building computers and past experiences, so I am sure someone will be picky and pick me up on the finer details of the technical words)

Cheers for the info there, Skatie.

Alex

Partitions are basically like this, before you even format, you have to partition. Three main types of partitions, primary (upto three of these) Extended and Logical. (only ever one extended, logical are created within the extended partitions, depends what you read you can have upto 23 of these or unlimited, I suspect they are unlimited, just limited to the drive latters you can assign, although you can always use mount points in folders) Older operating systems such as 95 and 98 can only boot from a primary partition (so bear that in mind while dual booting) This is basic disks, while using windows nt 2000 and xp pro you can also have dynamic disks, these are totally diff than basic disks, you can also create software RAID with dynamic disks, resize partitions without loosing data and stuff too. Alex, check out this for using the fdisk command
http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/tips/msdos/fdisk.htm

The computers BIOS is usually entered by the Delete or F2 key. However this is sometimes different on different manufacturers computers. In which case when the computer is turned on and you are presented with the boot information, it will inform you of which key to press to access BIOS.

With regards to the difference between CMOS and BIOS:

CMOS is simply the CHIP the BIOS information is stored on.

PENGUIN just about covered the partition info. There are a number of different partition formats also. Fat32/NTFS are the most common but other operating systems from windows use different partition formats.



If the FDISK program is not stored on your computer you will most likely need a CD/Floppy with it on.

Partition Magic is also a piece of partitioning software but much more advanced than the standard Microsoft FDISK program.

Thanks for the info. there.

Alex

On the partitioning front...

In WinXP the place to look is the administrative tools -> computer management -> Disk management

NOTE: This is only for new disks unless you're planning on wiping partitions..


A useful utility aside from Partition Magic is Ranish Partition Manager:
http://www.ranish.com/part/
.. although it's more for "Expert" users or students with a machine they can "toast" ;)