Help from the jungle Please show me the detailed partitioning method

A new hard disk cannot boot the system until it is partitioned and formatted. We can boot the system via a bootable CD-ROM (such as Win98/Me boot CD) or a floppy disk with boot function. If your system does not yet support this boot method, you should enter the BIOS setup program and change the First Boot Device to "ATAPI CD- ROM Drive" or "Floppy Devices" to "ATAPI CD-ROM Drive" or "Floppy Devices".

Using the Fdisk command for partitioningAfter bootstrapping the system with a CD-ROM or floppy disk, enter DOS and run the "Fdisk" command, a large English message will appear on the screen, and the last line "Do you wish to enable large disksupport (y/n)?" Ask the user if he/she wishes to use the large disk mode, here you need to type "Y", otherwise you will not be able to create a hard disk partition with a capacity of more than 2GB. After running Fdisk, the system will ask if you want to use the large hard disk mode, you must choose "Y" here, otherwise you will not be able to create a hard disk of more than 2GB.

Create primary DOS partition

Next, enter the main Fdisk interface, where there are four options, with the following meanings:

Create DOS partition or logical DOS drive: Creates a DOS partition or logical drive

Set active partition: Sets the active partition. partition: Set active partition

Delete partition or logical DOS drive: Delete partition or logical drive

Display partition information: Display partition information

Creates a DOS partition in Fdisk. If it is a brand new unpartitioned hard disk, select "1" and press enter, you will see a new window, select "1. Create Primary DOS partition" to create a primary DOS partition. Fdisk program will ask "Do you wish to use the Maximum available size for a Primary DOS Partition (Y/N)", the default choice is "Y The default choice is "Y", which will create all hard disk space as one partition. It is recommended to choose "N" to create multiple partitions, otherwise it is not good for disk management, and it is also easy to waste hard disk space. Before creating a primary DOS partition, the system will ask you if you want to create all disk space as one partition. The primary DOS partition, which is already divided, takes up 21% of the hard disk space.

There will be a short disk verification process, and then you will need to set the amount of hard disk space in MB to be allocated to the primary DOS partition in the window that appears next, so type in the appropriate figure or percentage of the hard disk capacity as appropriate and then enter. When you're done, press Esc to return to the main menu.

Creating an Extended DOS Partition

Go to the "Create DOS Partitions and Logical Drives" window again and select "2. Create Extended DOS Partition" to start creating the partition. The program will first tell you the maximum space available on your current hard drive to create an extended DOS partition, so just enter it. To create an extended DOS partition, you don't need to change the system default settings, just press Enter.

Creating logical partitions

When the extended DOS partition creation is complete, the program will remind you that there is currently no logical partition, press the Esc key to automatically enter the logical partition creation interface, the default setting is to create all the current space as a logical partition, it is recommended that you do not use the default settings, in order to create a few more logical partitions, to facilitate the management of hard disk data. To create a logical DOS partition, you can enter the appropriate values as needed.

Viewing and deleting partitions

Select "4. Display Partition Information" in the main window of Fdisk to view partition information. If you are not satisfied with the partition capacity, you can also select "3 Delete partition or logical DOS drive" to delete the partition. The order of deleting hard disk partitions is the reverse of partitioning, with logical partitions deleted first, extended partitions deleted second, and the primary DOS partition deleted last.

Set Active Partition

In the main Fdisk interface, select "2. Set Active Partition" to set the active partition, and then type "1" (i.e., partition C) to activate the primary partition. Activating means to set the primary DOS partition of the drive as bootable, without which an error will be prompted at boot time.

Now that the partitioning of the new drive is all but complete, we need to exit the Fdisk program and reboot the system, and then perform an advanced format with the format command.

Advanced Partitioning Techniques

Before we get into advanced partitioning techniques, it's important to understand the concept of clustering. The file system is an important part of the operating system, and nowadays our commonly used Windows operating systems can support a variety of file systems, such as FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS file systems, etc. The file system is the link between the operating system and the drive. The file system is an interface between the operating system and the drive. When the operating system requests to read a file from the hard disk, it will request the corresponding file system (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS) to open the file, and the concept of clusters also appears at this time. Although we know that a sector is the smallest physical storage unit on a disk, for the DOS operating system, sectors are much smaller (just 512 bytes), and DOS cannot address a large number of sectors. According to the original design of DOS, DOS can only handle 216 disk units, which can be either sectors or clusters made up of collections of sectors. Therefore, when using the FAT16 format, sectors must be organized into "clusters", each of which can consist of 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64 sectors. Clusters are a logical concept used by the operating system, not a physical characteristic of the disk. The size of the cluster directly affects the size of the partition table on a hard drive. While larger clusters can manage more disk space and result in faster read/write speeds and better seek times, they can also result in wasted disk space due to the increased size of the partition table and the larger cluster size.

For example, a one-byte file on a partition with 2KB per cluster takes up 2K bytes of disk space; a one-byte file on a partition with 16KB per cluster takes up 16KB of space. The space from the end of the file to the end of the cluster for that file is called the cluster overhang space, and the larger the accumulated cluster overhang space, the more wasted space on the disk.

At this point, we need to find a way to partition the disk that takes into account both performance and capacity. This is often referred to as per-cluster partitioning, and to do so requires third-party partitioning software, such as PQmagic, which is one of the most common.

From PQmagic's analysis, it is easy to see that too many clusters for a partition with data on it would be a waste of disk space.

Typically, for partition sizes up to 8GB, setting the cluster size to 8KB balances performance and capacity.

If you want to maximize hard disk space, you need to partition by cluster according to usage. For example, if the partition is 8G and the partition is a boot partition, setting the cluster to 8KB will save more disk space than setting the cluster to 16KB. Because boot partitions often need to read and write data, which is usually very large and small, using large clusters would be a waste of disk space and would not be conducive to data addressing. However, if this partition is a logical partition and only stores some high-capacity video files, there is no need to set the value of the cluster too low, which is not conducive to reading and writing. It is easy to see that too large clusters result in wasted disk space.

Also, you can't set the clusters for very large partitions too small, which not only affects read/write speeds, but also tends to create file fragmentation.

Daily maintenance and organization of the hard drive

We often delete and copy a lot of files during our daily use of the computer, which can lead to a lot of fragmentation of the hard drive, and a complete file is saved in all corners of the disk, affecting the computer to find and execute the file speed. This affects the speed of the computer in finding and executing files. This is why it's important to perform a regular disk cleanup.

First of all, we can do this through the Windows Disk Defragmenter, which is a two-part defragmentation and startup optimization utility that can greatly improve the speed of reading and writing to and from the disk. Although these two functions are very practical, but due to the collation of time is too long, and often on the hard disk for a long time disk organization will reduce the life of the hard disk, so we recommend the use of dedicated disk organization software, here we recommend VoptXP and Norton disk utilities in the Speed Disk these two software.

The disk organizer VoptXP

Launch the software and its main interface will appear. The software defaults to start organizing from the C drive, if you need to organize other hard disks, you can also press the lower triangular button here to select other disk symbols. By analyzing it, we see that there is a lot of fragmentation on the disk, which undoubtedly affects the speed of the disk's operation.

Select "Error checking" in the "Tools" menu to invoke Windows' own disk error checking program to detect the disk, so as to avoid the existence of directory structure errors on the hard disk, which affects the speed and effectiveness of disk organization. This will prevent the hard disk from having directory structure errors, which will affect the speed and effect of disk organizing. After checking for errors, we can proceed to defragment the disk.

Click on the window to start defragmenting the disk, a process that usually takes a long time, so please be patient. Once the defragmentation is complete, we see that the files are arranged in a more continuous manner, with no fragments in between. Now, the read and write speeds of the hard disk will increase accordingly. After defragmentation, the disk is significantly less fragmented.

Norton disk utility Speed Disk

Norton Systemwoks 2003 provides Speed Disk, a defragmentation software that rearranges the disk according to different file types, with files that are frequently read by the system being placed in the outermost lanes of the hard disk to increase the speed of reading them. Norton Systemwork 2003 provides Speed Disk, which is a very effective way to defragment the disk.

Select the SpeedDisk program in Norton Disk Utility. In the main interface of the program, there are four main function buttons on the left side. They are, in order, Hard Drive Optimization Chart, Hard Drive Partition Analysis, Hard Drive Partition Options, and Timing Settings. Before proceeding with the optimization, we can choose the second item to analyze the data content on the hard disk to see if there is too much hard disk fragmentation that needs to be sorted out. After clicking "Start Analyzing", the hard disk starts to analyze the type of data in the selected partition and then draws a conclusion. We see that fragmented files make up 8.4% of the total data on the entire partition, and generally speaking, any fragmentation less than 10% does not need to be defragmented. An analysis of the disk reveals that fragmented files make up only 8.4% of the total amount of data on the entire partition.

If you want to defragment your disk, press the "Start Optimazing" button in the Optimization Map again to begin. This is a very time-consuming process, but it's much faster than Windows' own disk defragmentation program. By default, the program defragments the C drive, so if you want to defragment other partitions, go ahead and select the other partitions and repeat the steps above in order. After the defragmentation process, the disk is significantly less fragmented and the files are more tightly arranged.

Hard drive data rescue

Using a computer for many years, it is inevitable that bumps and bruises caused by some security risks, loss of system files, or data corruption can be caused by disk bad sectors. Hard disk bad path including soft bad path and hard bad path, the former can be repaired by specific software, and can continue to use, while the latter is the real physical sense of the damage, light is the loss of a certain amount of disk space, heavy hard disk is hopeless, completely obsolete.

Repairing a hard drive's soft/hard drive

Repairing a soft drive is as simple as using Windows' Disk Repair Tool or Advanced Formatting to deal with the problem. For hard bad sectors, we can use software such as LF to try to fix them by performing a low-level formatting of the hard disk.

Run LF, select the drive ID, and perform a low-level format on the drive. The so-called low-level formatting is to divide the blank disk into cylinders and tracks, and then divide the tracks into sectors, and each sector is divided into an identification part ID, a spacing area GAP, and a data area DATA, and so on. Low-level formatting can only be done in the DOS environment, and can only be done for one hard disk and cannot support a single partition. Low-level formatting is a wear-and-tear operation on the hard disk, which has a negative impact on the life of the hard disk. Therefore, many hard disk manufacturers recommend that users do not format their hard disks using low-level formatting unless absolutely necessary. Some bad tracks and sectors can be repaired by low-level formatting, but physical scratches on the surface of a real hard drive disk cannot be repaired, except by normal formatting to mark the location of the bad sectors so that the operating system will not use them. Physical bad sectors may gradually expand as the head reads and writes, leading to more and more bad sectors and eventually to unusable ones, so it is recommended to back up important data on the hard drive after a bad sector has appeared.

Running LF under DOS allows you to perform a low-level formatting of the disk and repair the disk's soft sectors. Lformat, which has a graphical interface, can also perform low-level formatting of disks.

Repairing a zero-track

The hard disk's Master Boot Record Area (MBR) is on the zero-track and is located on track 0, platen 0, sector 1 of the hard disk, where the hard disk's master bootloader and the hard disk's partition table are stored. In the total ****512 bytes of hard disk master boot record sector, 446 bytes belong to the hard disk master boot program, 64 bytes belong to the hard disk partition table (DPT), two bytes (55 AA) belong to the end-of-partition flag. Once a zero-track is damaged, the hard drive's master bootloader and partition table information is severely damaged, resulting in the hard drive being unbootable.

The usual repair method is to fix it with DE (Disk Editor) of Pctools 9.0 (or other similar tools that can edit disk sectors), which works by deflecting the zero path by one track and occupying 1 track.

With Windows 9x boot disk startup, run PcTools directory de.exe, first into the "Options" menu, select "Configuration" (Configuration) command. Remove the Read Only checkbox, and then save and exit.

Then select the main menu "Select" (Select) in the Drive (Drive), go to the "Drive type" (Drive type) item select Physical (physical), and then switch to "Drives" (Drive type) item select Physical (physical), and then switch to "Drives" (Drive type) item select Physical (physical), and then switch to "Drives" (Drive type) item select Physical (physical). Then switch to "Drives", select "Hard disk", and finally select "OK" and enter.

After that, go back to the main menu, open the "Select" menu, then the Partition Table (Partition Table) will appear, select and enter, the hard disk partition table information appears. If the hard disk has two partitions, 1 partition is the C disk, the partition is from the hard disk of the 0-column start. Then, change 0 to 1 in the Beginning Cylinder of partition 1. Save and exit.

Reboot, enter CMOS settings, select "IDE AUTO DETECT", you can see that the number of CYLS (tracks) is reduced by 1, save the settings and exit. Re-partition and re-format the drive to save it.

It should be noted that the DE tool is only effective for FAT16-formatted hard drives, and for FAT32-partitioned hard drives you will need to convert them to FAT16 format first through disk tools such as Partition Master, and then make changes to them.

Repair damaged partition table

After the hard disk is partitioned, it is better to backup the partition table for security reasons, so that once the partition table is damaged, it can be easily recovered. In this regard, the famous domestic antivirus software KV3000 and Rising Star series provide a complete solution. For hard drives that do not have a backup partition table, although KV3000 also provides a corresponding repair method, but the success rate is relatively low.

The famous Norton Disk Doctor (NDD) is a very effective tool for repairing the partition table of a hard disk, and can automatically repair partition loss and other situations. When a hard drive crashes, boot your system with a floppy disk containing a DOS system, run NDD, and select "Diagnose" to diagnose the problem.NDD will do a full scan of the hard drive, and if there are any errors, it will prompt you to do so. If there are any errors, it will indicate them, and you can fix them very easily by choosing to repair them according to these prompts. Under Windows 9x, there is also NDD32, whose graphical interface will get you twice as far with half the effort.

The powerful EasyRecovery maximizes the recovery of deleted hard disk data.

In addition, DiskMan, a Chinese disk utility, is a master in this field. Rebuild Partition Table as one of its very useful features is perfect for repairing damaged partition tables.

For systems where the hard disk partition table is corrupted, using DiskMan you can rebuild the partition table from the boot record information of the uncorrupted partitions. By selecting "Rebuild Partition Table" in the toolbar of the menu, DiskMan will start searching and rebuilding the partitions. DiskMan will first search the implied sectors starting from sector 2 of header 0 of platen 0 to find the moved partition table, and then search the first sector of each header. The search process is divided into "automatic" and "interactive" methods. The automatic method keeps every partition found and is suitable for most cases. The interactive method gives a prompt for each partition found and lets the user choose whether to keep it or not. When the partition table rebuilt by the automatic method is incorrect, the interactive method can be used to search again. However, the rebuild partition table feature cannot do 100 percent successful repair.

Hardware protection of hard disk data

When it comes to hardware protection, naturally, we have to mention the hard disk protection card first. The hard disk protection card, also known as hard disk restore card, is the best solution to completely solve the problem of computer data protection. It protects and recovers data on the hard disk from the hardware level, and can instantly recover from all kinds of intentional or unintentional data loss. Hard disk protector card utilizes the redundancy of hard disk media (i.e., each hard disk cannot use up all the hard disk space), so that all the free space in each hard disk automatically becomes its own buffer, and therefore does not have to take up a fixed amount of hard disk space. Moreover, after using the hard disk protector card, in most cases, even if the user performs Fdisk and format commands on the hard disk, or other software level damages, even including virus damages to the hard disk data, as long as restarting and pressing specific hotkeys, the hard disk data will be restored to the state of the most recent archive in just a few seconds, and the speed of which is incomparable to that of all software recovery methods. The speed is unmatched by any software recovery method. Furthermore, the installation of the Hard Disk Restore Card is extremely easy to use and highly intelligent, even the installation diskette can be dispensed with, it is truly plug and play. After installation, all user interfaces and operations are the same as before installation, and the user does not feel the presence of the card at all.

Not only can hard drive restore cards protect against all kinds of damage, but they can also protect CMOS parameters and motherboard BIOS data against malicious viruses, even the famous CIH virus can't do anything about it, which really realizes the all-around protection of computer data.

The common hard drive protection cards are Sanming's PC Defender and Watchdog Intelligent System Recovery Card, etc.

The hard drive protection card can also be used to protect your computer's hardware and software from viruses.

Through the motherboard to achieve the protection of hard disk data

Now, many motherboards provide protection for hard disk data, such as JetBlade's "Data Recovery Wizard" and Lenovo QDI's "Aegis Protection System".

Aegis (RecoveryEasy) is a hard disk data protection technology for Lenovo QDI motherboards. With this technology, motherboards can back up, protect, and instantly recover hard drive data, preventing the loss of important data. In addition, Aegis also protects and recovers data in CMOS.


Onboard Power and Reset buttons are accompanied by a LED Debug Display that puts users in the driving seat when experimenting with different hardware configurations.

Hard disk data recovery

We know that when you execute the delete command, the computer is only the file directory item 0 byte to E5, and the file occupied by the cluster number in the file partition table registration item clear zero, said to free up space. When formatting, the computer also just clears the root directory area to zero. This means that the deletion and formatting operations only in the file name or the root directory area to do some manipulation, the file data itself has not moved in the slightest, so that the file recovery to provide the possibility. Using some anti-deletion software, you can easily recover deleted data. As long as the partition is not disrupted with the Fdisk command, and the clusters occupied by the files to be recovered are not occupied by other files, most of the data can be recovered.

If you have a working Windows system, the easiest recovery method is to use EasyRecovery for Windows, which is very powerful in recovering hard disk data, not only files erased from the Recycle Bin, but also files from formatted FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS partitions.

The program is very simple to use, run EasyRecovery and the main interface appears. The left side of the screen contains four function buttons and two software support buttons. Clicking on the "Data Recovery" button, we can see that EasyRecovery Professional offers a variety of data recovery options. These include: customizing the data recovery function with advanced options, finding and recovering deleted files, recovering files from a formatted volume, recovering without relying on any information about the file system structure, and more. The software can also save the progress of recovered data and create bootable emergency boot diskettes.

EasyRecovery offers up to six data repair modes to recover lost hard disk data from various sources. Perform a scan of the disk to find out the lost data. Select the files you want to recover and click "Apply" to start recovery.

After installing Norton UnErase Wizard, a blue shield icon will appear on the Recycle Bin indicating that the files are protected. Now we select "Customize Data Recovery Features with Advanced Options" to perform the data recovery operation. After scanning the system, the disk drive information will be displayed. Here we select the hard disk partition where we want to recover the data as C. At this point, EasyRecovery Professional will automatically scan the partition and then display all the detailed file information, including the files that still exist and those that have been deleted. After that, select the files we want to recover and click "Apply" to start recovery. In addition to EasyRecover, there are many other programs such as Revival, Recover, etc., which can be used to save you in critical situations.

If you have installed Norton Utilities or Norton UnErase Wizard before you lost your data, it will be easy to recover it. After installing Norton UnErase Wizard, a blue shield icon will appear on the Recycle Bin. At this point, if we have deleted a text file and emptied the Recycle Bin, you can easily recover it using Norton UnErase Wizard. Double-click the Recycle Bin icon to search for deleted files, you can see the deleted files from the list, select the file and click Recover to recover it. After installing Norton UnErase Wizard, a blue shield icon will appear on the Recycle Bin.

Norton Utilities provides powerful disk file repair features. three different file recovery modes available in Norton Utilities. Alternatively, we can open the UnErase Wizard option in Find and Fix Problems in the main interface of Norton Utilities, where three different recovery methods are provided. These are Find Deleted Files, Find All Protected Files in a Specific Partition and Find Files to Recover by File Open Type. Recover deleted files by file type.

Generally, most of the lost files can be recovered using the above methods. However, sometimes you may find that you can't find the lost files using the tools described above, what is the reason for this? As mentioned earlier, disk space is allocated in clusters. Disk clusters are the smallest unit of space that the file system allocates, releases, and reads out, even if there is only one byte of the file also takes up a whole cluster of disk storage space. When we write the file to disk, the file that occupies a certain number of clusters on the disk, the file is deleted from the disk, the disk will release a certain number of clusters. At this point, if you restore the deletion operation, the file is most likely to be recovered. If a write operation is performed to the disk after the file is deleted, the new file may overwrite the clusters originally occupied by the deleted file, and the file cannot be successfully recovered.

Reducing hard drive noise

Many hard drive manufacturers offer advanced hard drive applications that allow professional users to better utilize their hard drives, such as Maxtor's Maxtor Silent Store technology. With this technology we can adjust the sound of the hard drive seeker to reduce the noise generated when the hard drive is working.

The software based on this technology is called Maxtor Acoustic Management and allows you to control the volume level of the Maxtor hard disk when it is in operation. It has two levels of control, Quiet and Fast. If you select Quiet, the disk will enter Quiet Seek mode, where the noise level is significantly reduced and disk performance decreases drastically; if you select Fast, the disk will enter Fast Seek mode, where the performance level decreases relatively little, but the noise level is not reduced as much as it should be.The main executable file for Acoustic Management is amset.exe, which has four command parameters: amset.exe /quiet cuts into Quiet mode; amset.exe /fast cuts into Fast mode; amset.exe /off turns off the noise reduction function, at this time the hard disk has the highest performance but the most noise; amset.exe /check can check the current status of the hard disk noise reduction function. check to see the current status of the noise reduction function on your hard disk. Finally, you must be a DiamondMax Plus 40, DiamondMax 60, DiamondMax VL 30, DiamondMax Plus 40, D540X, D740X series user to utilize these features. Reduce Hard Disk Noise with Maxtor Silent Store Technology