Setting up brand new SATA 2 HD

[jagnet]

Hello,

I am going to be building a new system in a couple of days and it's been a while since I built my last system so I have a question regarding the HDD setup. My last system used IDE drives whereas my new one will be using SATA 2 drives. I know the differences between the two and I know all about the RAID options but what I am wondering is how to go about the setup of the drive for first time use. Such as FDISK and FORMATTING them, (well moreso the FDISK part then the formatting) I know back in the day ya had to FDISK a brand new hard drive before it could be used. Since it's been a while since I set up a brand new HDD I am wondering if this still needs to be done. And if so, what would the step by step proccess be for setting the HD up. Physical installation isn't a problem but do I still need to use FDISK these days or will Windows XP Pro SP2 do the work for me when I install the OS? Any help is greatly appreciated. I won't be using RAID in the setup of the drive. I'll just be installing the drive and using it as a main hard drive. I'll install a secondary drive later on but for now just the one HDD.

I thank you in advance for any help possible.

-Jagnet

 

[jagnet]

Sorry, I guess I should add that the Hard Drive is a Western Digital 250GB SATA 2 3Gb/s.

Thanks

 

[jagnet]

bump

 

[tonymarcus]

When you install Win Xp it will give you the option to set up and format a partition so the days of fdisk are over.

You can buy a disk manager program such as Partition magic which will give you more options such as resizing partitions etc but you won't need this if you only want to set up one partition and leave it.

Make sure you chose NTFS file system as it's better than Fat 32.

Good luck

Tony

 

[jagnet]

Thank you very much Tony, answered my question perfectly!

-Jagnet

 

[tonymarcus]

Your welcome, hope the install goes well