Hard Drive BIOS Settings

As long as it has such a setting, it is best to set the BIOS to Auto, so that it detects the hard drive settings itself. Manually entering these settings might slightly reduce the time it takes for a computer to boot, but it won't be significant enough to make it worthwhile. Some motherboards auto-detect the drive the first time and set the parameters so that they don't have to detect the drives each time. The other option is often called User, meaning that the user sets the parameters. If you feel you need to set the information manually, the information is usually printed on the drive label, or is available from the drive manufacturer's Web site and includes such items as cylinders, heads, write precomp, landing zone, sectors, and size mode.

Also, look in the BIOS setup program for a S.M.A.R.T. drive setting. This feature reports potential problems with the hard drive. Sometimes it will report that a hard drive is ready to fail. This will hopefully give you time to back up the data to another drive before you lose it all. Certainly, no harm can come from enabling S.M.A.R.T., so as long as the setting is available, it should always be enabled.

Disk Partitioning and Formatting

The next step is to partition and format the drive as described earlier in this tutorial. In addition to FDISK, there are other setup programs you can use. In fact, just about all hard drive manufacturers offer installation, diagnostic, and other utilities free for download from their Web sites. Ontrack Data Recovery Services (ontrack.com) has enhanced versions of some of these utilities for sale. These utilities have many advantages over FDISK and FORMAT, including the capability of formatting partitions as NTFS.

On the CD The Industry Contacts document on the CD-ROM lists hard drive manufacturers. Visit their Web sites and look for downloads for installation, diagnostic, BIOS size limitation, and other utilities.

Tip Early in the Windows 2000/XP installation process, you are prompted to press the F6 key in case you want to install drivers for a special drive controller. You must do this if you want to install the OS on a SCSI or SATA hard drive. This option is available for only a few seconds.

When you set up Windows 2000 or XP from scratch or perform a clean install (installing an OS on a formatted drive, as opposed to running an upgrade), you can boot from an installation floppy or CD and follow the prompts. At a certain point you'll be shown a graph of available partitions and you'll be asked how you want to proceed. You might be able to use existing partitions or delete them and let Setup create new ones for you. You simply answer the prompts concerning the installation partition and file system you want. Then, Setup formats the partition as set. There is no need to pre-format a drive before installing 2000 or XP.

Note You might come across a function in a BIOS setup program or elsewhere called "low-level formatting." Never do this; it would likely ruin the drive and invalidate the warranty. The point of low-level formatting is to do a complete format and erase everything to eliminate a virus or prepare the drive for a new user. This includes data that the manufacturer wrote onto an otherwise inaccessible portion of the drive. If you need to perform this operation, use the drive manufacturer's utility. In Seagate's case, for example, the procedure is called "Zero Fill" because it replaces all data with zeroes, and is done with Seagate's Disk Wizard software.

Third-party disk management programs such as Power Quest's PartitionMagic (powerquest.com) have many features that aren't available in Windows or from any of the utilities that come with new hard drives. You can use PartitionMagic to create, delete, undelete, re-size, hide, merge, or move partitions, as well as change the file system or drive letters, all without losing data. These and many other features make it an especially useful tool for a technician to have, especially if you discover that you have finished installing an OS only to discover that you made an error in partitioning or formatting. You can use Partition Magic to correct the error without having to start all over.

Once you have installed, formatted, and partitioned the drive, you should be ready to install the OS.