for those of u wondering about partitioning ur hdd, read these great articles on it:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives_01.htm

http://partition.radified.com/

Yes, I finally get to make parts. Woooo hoooooo

Is there actually any way in partioning your HD without going through the windows install process. So i could just do it right now instead of having to reformat or reinstall windows???

Partition Magic

http://www.powerquest.com/partitionmagic/

yeah but you have to pay for that... is there any way to do it manually?

well i havnt actually partitioned yet and one of those sites said that there is no feature in windows yet for partitioning, so try googling for one, it will probably suck tho and it might screw up ur system files.

The fastest way to partition a harddrive is to use the EZ diskette or CD, which comes with your harddrive. It creates partitions in less than a minute.

Not that it really matters, but in doing sooooo many installations I've determined the following for purely aesthetic purposes.

Essentailly these are the largest MB you can type and have "nice" Total Sizes for the details view of My Computer.

1.00 GB = 1031 MB

1.25 GB = 1290 MB

2.00 GB = 2059 MB

4.00 GB = 4106 MB

5.00 GB = 5134 MB

6.00 GB = 6153 MB

7.00 GB = 7181 MB

7.50 GB = 7691 MB

8.00 GB = 8201 MB

9.00 GB = 9228 MB

10.0 GB = 10342 MB

11.0 GB = 11370 MB

12.0 GB = 12389 MB

16.0 GB = 16484 MB

The largest MB's you can type for FAT32 is

32.0 GB = 32769 MB

Where did you get those numbers?

The system reads disk space in base2, i.e. in multiples of 1024 (2^10) bytes.

Therefore 1GB = 1024MB

You can work out the multiples from there.

This is always how I've done my parititons (or rounded up one step in the software) and they've always come out as nice numbers in Windows.

Windows rounds/truncates the values when it displays the 'total size'. I used to use the base 2 numbers, but i would get partitions like 7.99 GB so I figured I would test to find the maximum MB value I could type to get 'nice ~ .00' values.

This is just a purely aesthetic thing. Yes 9.00 GB = 9216 MB, and 9228 MB = 9.01171875 MB, which windows displays as 9.00 GB. It's just a matter of squeezing in a little extra space.

Most of this came about due to partitioning my notebook hdd.

[Edit]

These values apply to NTFS

As for the rounding up, the unformatted 8 MB, and the question of why windows moves in 7-8 MB steps, when typing in values I've approximated the step size as

8224768 bytes = 7.84375 MB = 251/32 MB

"round/truncates"

it doesnt rounf b/c then it could round down, if talking to idiots then u can tell them it rounds dowm but rly it truncates which means that if there is a fractional part, ex:3.87 ,then the decimal is just cut off and the result would be 3

Ok, I have no idea how windows determines the hdd total size.

I think it uses

Int(10*(hdd size))/10

Where the hdd size is a GB when details view is on. On some occasions Windows has displayed 1023 MB on my system when I partitioned 1 GB. So the GB reference, in this case, does not exactly mean 2^30 bytes, but the point when Windows determines GB should be used in place of the MB.