System Software Solutions; Partitioning And Formatting The Hard-Disk Drive - Dell Inspiron 3800 Reference And Troubleshooting Manual

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C H A P T E R 4

System Software Solutions

This chapter explains how to reinstall Dell device drivers and utilities on your Dell
computer running the Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 2000, or
Windows NT operating system. You may need to use this document under the follow-
ing conditions:
•
You are reinstalling the version of the Windows operating system that came with
your computer, and you need to reinstall the drivers and utilities that Dell
provides.
•
You have a new hard-disk drive and you need to install all of the system software.
Partitioning and Formatting the Hard-Disk
Drive
Before you can store data on a hard-disk drive, you must partition and format the
drive. Then you must assign logical drive letters to the partitions you created.
To partition and format the new hard-disk drive and then assign logical drive letters to
the partitions you created, perform the following steps.
NOTICE: Formatting a hard-disk drive erases all data stored on the drive;
however, the formatting utility included with the operating system may
allow you to restore the data on a hard-disk drive immediately after you
format it. Partitioning a hard-disk drive permanently deletes all data
stored on the drive.
1. Partition the hard-disk drive by using the partitioning software for your particular
operating system.
When you set up the partition(s) on the hard-disk drive, set aside some disk
space for the save-to-disk (S2D) suspend partition rather than allocating the entire
hard-disk drive to your operating system. Use the following guidelines to
determine the size of the S2D partition:
•
For a 16-bit file allocation table (FAT16), leave 4 megabytes (MB) of storage
space for an S2D partition. For a 32-bit file allocation table (FAT32), leave
8 MB.
System Software Solutions 4-1