Just bought a new Dell PC Dimension 8400, which comes with 2 x 160GB SATA mirrored drives.

System is great, but I was expecting to be able to partition the drive during the setup process, say 40GB C, 120GB (odd) D. This was not the case, usual blurb about keyboard settings, comp name, user name and that was it.

Running Win XP Pro, cannot see anything included where I can still do this.

Any ideas?

TIA

 

Dell's usually come with the disks already partitioned. All you effectively do is boot the OS and configure your country settings, name, etc..

The only way around this is to boot off the Dell XP CD that shipped with the unit and do a manual install of XP.

Works on the OptiPlex range, not sure about Dimensions if it's sold as a home PC.

 

If you want to do it without a re-install, then something like Partition Magic will do it - should cost something like £40 or £50.

 

Thanks guys.

I might do a re-install, remove some of the crud that seems to come bundled with every new PC.

Seems also I have "lost" 13GB of storage somewhere!! Drives are 160GB. 3GB or so taken up on a FAT32 partition. 10GB unaccounted for!

 

They'll be 160GB unformatted. You always loose a chunk when formatting any drive be it hard disk, floppy, CD, DVD, etc..

My 100GB drive is about 95GB formatted.

When you do the manual install, you'll be able to see any other partitions (e.g. Dell system one) that may be stealing some space. It's been like that since as far back as I can remember. Just one of those annoying IT things I'm afraid.

Stefan

 

Partition magic would be the best bet if you can't be bothered re-installing. Plus you can alter the partitions whenever you want in Windows without buggerizing everything !

 

Or if you don't want to fork out for Partition Magic, download the ISO from http://www.sysresccd.org/ and run qt_parted

 

As other have posted 160Gb is the unformatted size. My 160Gb drive when formatted (NTFS) shows as 149Gb.

 

Simply...
Hard Drives are sold using the literal meanings of "giga" and "mega" so 1000MB = 1GB (a billion bytes). Of course, computers work in powers of 2 so 1024MB = 1GB.

You don't actually lose that much to the filesystem.