Setting up an external hard drive

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pennyluwho

New Member
Hello! I just bought a 300GB external hard drive and am having trouble setting it up. I initialized it but I do not know anything about partitioning! Help me! I will be transferring all of my music for my Ipod to it and am stuck at how to go about this. Thanks for all your help!

Heather
 
If you are running XP the task belongs to the Disk Manager found in the Computer Management under Administrative tools in the Control Panel. There you can have the DM partition the drive for you if it is detected in Windows. If you are running an older operating system even with XP you would probably use a disk partitioning software. First see if the drive is being detected in MyComputer or if running XP the Disk Manager.
 
usually it will come with software and/or drivers and instructions on how to perform such tasks. always check the manuals first.
 
What is the purpose of partitioning? I have never set these up before and I am not sure what that means. My user manual does not say anything about what it is and I can not find anything that tells me what it is. I am mainly going to use it to store music for itunes and my ipod.
 
Partitioning makes the drive accessible for preparation in installing the operating system that will go on it. Once a determined amount of space is available called the partition it is then formatted for drive ready status where the OS is then able to be installed. To get a better understanding of just what partitioning is and how it works review a few links here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_partitioning
http://www.ranish.com/part/primer.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/tulloch_partition.mspx
http://rhn.uta.edu/pub/docs/RH-DOCS/rhel-ig-s390-multi-en-3/s1-diskpartsetup.html
 
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