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Q.  I have a 13 GB IDE HD that I have decided to partition to organise my files better. When I went into FDISK, the program says that my hard drive is only 12.1 GB. In Windows '98 it also shows as 12.1 GB. In the BIOS it shows as 13 GB. How can that be? Is it necessary to have DOS disks when partitioning?

This is another case of the incredible shrinking disk!! Unfortunately, many manufacturers quote the unformatted capacity of the hard disk when they specify the size of the drive. They do this so that their drives appear to be bigger than the competition! They sometime also quote the size in millions of bytes rather than megabytes (since a megabyte is actually 1048576 bytes!) again so that their drives appear to be bigger.

While your drive may be a 13,000,000,000 byte capacity drive, when you partition it and format it you will only have 12,992,276,070 bytes free hence Windows and FDISK display the drive as a 12.1 gigabyte drive! Be assured that there is nothing wrong with the drive other than dodgy marketing practices of the manufacturer or dealer.

While you do not need to have DOS disks while partitioning your drive, it is essential that you have a boot disk and your Windows '98 CDs so that you can reload your computer after you partition the disk. This is because partitioning your hard disk will completely wipe all programs and data from your hard disk!!!

At the risk of repeating myself, it is also essential that you make two backups of your computer before you attempt any serious changes such as repartitioning the hard disk. The first backup should be a file backup, which can be made using Microsoft Backup or an alternative backup tool such as Novaback. The second backup should be a disaster recovery backup made using Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Copy. You would use the file backup to restore your files after you partition the hard disk and the disaster recovery backup to restore your machine if something goes wrong!

If all of this sounds like too much work (believe me it is!), then you could purchase a utility such as PowerQuest Partition Magic or PartitionIt (reviewed in PC Authority
magazine). These tools allow you to repartition the disk without wiping the hard disk. The tools are also graphics based, which makes them much easier to use than FDISK.

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