From: Michael Geary (Mike_at_Geary.com)
Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 16:55:38 EDT
> I wanted a small fat boot patition, a NTFS system patition,
> a NTFS apps patition, and a NTFS data patition.
Having so many NTFS partitions seems a bit cumbersome. Are you doing that
because of limited backup resources? I used a similar arrangement when I got
my first 48Gb drive and my backup drives were 18Gb each--but once I got
backup drives the same size as the main drive, I went back to a single NTFS
partition which is so much more convenient.
I do have a small utility partition at the beginning just like yours, with
my various disk and backup utilities. This is extremely handy on a notebook
computer where you don't want to have to use a floppy or CD to boot into
DOS.
> The first hurdle was getting the small boot patition as this
> was not plainly documented.
> It is obvious but I have learnt that Microsoft does not
> always go the obvious path 8->.
> Install W2k to the big NTFS D: drive and the install will put
> some of the boot files on the C: drive.
> I started with a 550 MB boot patition and decided to shrink
> it. This messed up the NT boot and I could not recover
> from it... I had to reinstall.
Ouch. Too late to help you here, but just for anyone else reading this,
there is another approach that is much smoother in the long run, because it
isolates NT/2000/XP from that DOS partition. You do need a partition
utility--anything that will let you create partitions and select the active
partition, preferably with a boot menu, will do the job.
Starting from an unpartitioned disk, use the partition utility's boot floppy
to:
1) Create the small FAT partition.
2) Format the FAT partition with DOS system files. Boot it to make sure it
works. You can install utility programs on this partition now, although I
find it handier to do it later from Windows.
3) Create the large NTFS partition.
4) *** Make the NTFS partition the active partition. ***
5) Install Windows 2000/XP into the NTFS partition.
Because the NTFS partition is the active partition, that will be the C:
drive in Windows, and the boot files will go there along with everything
else. The installer won't touch your FAT partition at all, and it will show
up in Windows as the D: drive.
With this setup, you won't get a multi-boot menu from NT, so you'll want to
install a boot utility that lets you select the active partition at boot
time. In a pinch, you can change the active partition using Disk Management
in NT and FDISK in DOS, but it's handier to have a boot menu utility. I use
System Commander, but anything that lets you select the active partition
will work.
The nice thing is that now you can do anything you want to the DOS
partition--resize it, format it, whatever--and it won't affect Windows at
all. If you make the NTFS partition the active partition, it will boot.
If you have an existing Win2K/XP installation running in your ThinkPad,
another way to do steps 1-4 above is to put the new drive in a second hard
drive adapter in the Ultrabay, and boot Windows and use Disk Management to
partition the drive. Create both partitions but leave the DOS partition
active. Then swap the new drive into the main drive bay and use a DOS floppy
to format the DOS partition with system files. Finally, use FDISK to make
the NTFS partition active, and install Windows there.
-Mike
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