“What is the Dos utility that allow you to partition a hard drive?” Without a doubt, this one question kept me from getting a job with the Geek Squad back when it rolled into the Best Buy stores. Looking back, yeah, I still do not feel bad about not getting that job.
I do have a twinge of remorse though from a short time back while I was working on some retro machines. I had some smallish, older hard drives (around 120gig) drives that I decided would work as portable drives for moving files to and from old machines (Windows 98). I was quickly reminded only after moving the drives to enclosures, that Windows 10 cannot format volumes over 30GB with FAT32. Thanks Microsoft. Now, there are 3rd party tools that can do this but I knew it was possible without them.
I plugged the drives into the Windows 98 machine and … did not get much farther. Well, since the tools in today’s Windows cannot do the job, time to break out the time machine and go back in time to dust off those dos tools and break out fdisk.
First, we need a command line as fdisk is a dos utility and does not have a graphical interface (unlike disk management in Windows 10). A bit of Start run magic …
Entering in fdisk in the command prompt gets into the program and the first question to answer
Large disk support turned on and at the main menu. Before going much further, let us check the current partitioning and switch to the drive we need to work on
New drive selected, no current partitions on it … Perfect! Time to create a new partition then.
We have a primary partition the size of the second hard drive, but we are not able to put any files on the drive yet since it is not formatted yet. Unlike preparing a drive on a system today, Windows 98 and earlier required the machine to be restarted to pick up the new partitions / drives. Then once rebooted …
Behold, a formatted hard drive! Of course there are a lot more things fdisk can do, but those are beyond what I needed right now, which was to add that second hard drive to use to store stuff. Now that the second drive is created and blank, time to put things on it.