stupid reformatting question and others

[speedy11309]

ok so its time for a complete reformat of my entire computer. yes all 410gigs are going buh-bye this weekend. but before i do, i have a couple questions. first, i have 2 harddrives currently with 3 partitions between the 2 of them. my 160gig ide hdd has windows installed on it. this is the entire drive, no partitions on this one. my sata hdd has 2 partitions, a 40gig one, and a 210gig one. now, when i format my sata drive in windows, will it create the drive as a whole again, like 1 250gig unpartitioned unformatted drive? or will it be 2 partitions: 1 40gig and 1 210gig? the reason im asking this is because i want to install windows on my sata drive on like a 40gig partition, then create another 40gig partition and install 64bit windows on it, and maybe even a 3rd 40gig partition and install like windows media center or linux or something. the rest would be for programs and the ide 160gig would be for storage.

that leads me to my next question: if i install 64bit and 32bit windows, will i have to install programs to each separate partition to get them to run? like if i install for example, firefox on 32bit windows partition, will i be able to use it in 64bit windows or will i have to reinstall it on my 64bit partition?

third question: when i go to reinstall windows, will it try to install back on my ide drive? for some reason i have this feeling that it will...

thanks for all the help

[NotMyBest2Day]

Before you start the format and are still in windows, go to control panel > administrative tools > computer management > disk manager

This will load up your partitions, and you can reformat or make more partitions from there. Out of personal preference, I do NTFS with 512-byte sectors, but that is completely optional. 512-byte sectors are far more efficient than the default 4k. It makes a bigger address table, but you end up with less wasted space (when you look at the properties of a 5-byte text file, you see size: 5 bytes; size on disk: 4,096 bytes on 4k, but size on disk is 512 bytes with 512-byte sectors, so less wasted space).

So, format the SATA drive with your partitions whilst windows still works, and then if you're going to make your IDE drive into storage and install the OSes on SATA, then you can just worry about formatting it after you get the OS installed on the SATA partition. The IDE drive will format from inside Windows the same way you formatted/partitioned the SATA drive, so that's pretty easy.

If your SATA drivers are considered legacy drivers, then the partitions should show up during the install process, if not, you'll have to do the "press F6 to install third-party drivers" option, which requires a floppy disk (unless you've custom-tailored an XP cd). You can tell setup to install on whatever partition you tell it to, so it won't default to the IDE drive, but it will label the IDE drive/partition as C:.

As far as programs sharing OSes, I'm not sure about that. Most programs rely on the registry, so using it on a different OS without actually installing it from that OS may create some problems. I would just install the programs from both OSes.

::pants::

[speedy11309]

As far as programs sharing OSes, I'm not sure about that. Most programs rely on the registry, so using it on a different OS without actually installing it from that OS may create some problems. I would just install the programs from both OSes.

thats what i was thinking and the reason why id need to install it on both drives. ugh, 1 dvd down, like 30 more to go :mad:

[speedy11309]

so i got pissed off and reformatted last nite. i got some spyware and said screw it. i made myself 5 partitions in total. 1 10gig for windows. 2 40 gigs for other os's. 160gigs for programs and crap. 160 gigs for storage. hopefully this will fix my problems.