I'm still busy working on getting my new PC set-up so this will be short. After playing around with it for awhile, I got to the serious business of wiping the drive clean, deleting the partitions Dell has (including a hidden one where I think they install their diagnostics) and setting it up how I like.
This being the wonderful world of Windows, it came formatted in NTFS. This means your handy Windows98 boot disk with FDISK on it can't do a whole lot (since it boots into DOS, which doesn't recognize NTFS). So I used the install CD to do all the changes to the partitions creating two to replace it. The first partition is NTFS and will be where all my applications go. The second partition is FAT32 and will be for my data.
I do this for two reasons, first, having a partition with just data on it makes it a whole lot easier to backup what I want to backup; that is, the data. I don't care about applications because I have the CDs they originally came on so I can always re-install them. The data, on the other hand, is what I need to backup.
Secondly, God forbid I should have some kind of drive failure, but if I do, I may be able to access the drive by booting from a DOS floppy disk. If I do, DOS will recognize the FAT32 partition and I may be able to copy stuff off the drive that way. Of course, there are drive failures that even booting from a diskette will not be able to help, but at least I'm giving myself another option, one that has saved my bacon more than once. YMMV.
Aloha!
