Hard Drive formatting process ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pier Calacino
  • Start date Start date
P

Pier Calacino

New member
Hello All,

I am building a DAW and have just got through installing two new Hard Drives and one CD-RW and one Zip Drive.

Can some one please explain to me what the correct process is in format these two Hard Drives when I fire it up for the first time ?

Thanks
Pier Calacino
 
It depends on the OS you're going to use.

If it's NT-based, like Windows 2000 and Windows XP, you don't have to worry about it because you can partition and format right from the installer. Windows 9x (Windows 98, ME, etc) installers are a bit pickier and it's typically recommended that you use fdisk to partition and format.com to format prior to installing (e.g. boot from a floppy that contains fdisk and format, both of which can be found in c:\windows\command on any Windows9x machine)

You only have to partition and format the lowest disk, because that's the disk that windows will want to use to install to and boot from. In other words, your OS should be primary master, and your second disk can be anywhere after it.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Hi Slackmaster 2000,

I will be using Windows 2000 Professional.

When I format the primary OS Hard Drive, what should I use? FAT 32 or NTFS.

And how and when do I format my other hard drive, and with what format ? NTFS, FAT 32. how do you make it Z:64

Is there a step by step post on the bbs on this subject ?

Thanks
Pier
 
I recommend NTFS for both drives. It's arguably a tad bit slower than FAT32, but it's more robust and recoverable. There was a time when FAT made sense, but it's slowly and surely disappearing.

Since you're using Windows 2000 professional, it's going to be EASY for you.

1) Only install the OS drive for now (and CDROM of course). Make sure the OS drive is on the *standard* IDE controller, and not a third party ATA controller.

2) Boot from the Windows 2000 CD...and wait and wait and wait for a while.

3) You will be presented with a menu that will allow you to define partitions on the hard disk it finds. Go ahead and create your partition, and choose NTFS for the file system (this might be your only choice).

4) Windows 2000 setup will automatically format the disk and install to it.

5) Once you have windows installed, and all of your drivers, etc...you can install the second drive. Make sure that the second drive is higher up than the lower drive (e.g. on a higher IDE channel or different controller).

6) After starting up, you won't see the drive because it hasn't been partitioned or formatted yet.

7) Click Start->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Mangement to bring up the "Computer Management" console. One of the features of this console is "Disk Manager" which you'll see listed in the tree in the left pane. Go ahead and click on it, and in the right pane you should see a graphic representing the hard disks in your computer. Right click on the secondary drive and choose to create a partition (or partitions). When it's done you may have to reboot (can't remember), but then the next step is to go back into Disk Management and format the drive (you will have more format options using the disk manager than you will using the main "My Computer" window). Windows will format the drive and you'll be ready to use it!

Slackmaster 2000
 
Slackmaster 2000.

I forgot to ask you, what is the deal with this Z:64 switch when formating the second drive. Does this make a difference ?

Thanks
Pier
 
That trick is basically to make windows use a larger cluster size when formatting the drive. This "cluster size" is basically the smallest chunk of data that can be read from the hard drive (by windows, this is not the same as a drive's block size which is always 512 bytes).

Using the Z:64 switch tells windows to format the drive using 64K clusters. That means that every file exists in 64K clusters on the hard drive. The downside is that a lot of space is wasted if you have a lot of smaller files. For instance, a 32 byte file is going to take up 64,000 bytes on the disk. Likewise, a 65K file is going to take up 128K on the disk. Now when it comes to audio you're usually talking about (relatively) small number of very large files, so the amount of wasted space is really pretty small. The supposed benefits of using larger clusters then, is that disk access will be faster because larger chunks of data will be read/written at once.

Personally I've never seen benchmarks to prove that larger cluster sizes are better. I mean it sort of makes sense, but when you consider the buffering that's already going on by both the drive, perhaps the controller, and the windows file subsystem, I'm not sure it's really that beneficial. But who cares, it doesn't hurt anything!

Now the "Z:" thing is what you'd use if you were formatting from the command line. When you format from the disk management snapin thing, it'll ask you for "allocation size", and a whole boatload of options. I would choose either 64K or "default"...or you could spend many hours benchmarking your various options and blah blah blah, but then you might just forget to record some damn music :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top