Home Lock Troubleshoot
I am reinstalling XP Home on a Gateway mx3228 notebook using Gateway’s xp cd?
And, once I wipe out the windows, I won’t have any internet resources to get answers to my questions, so I hope to do all my troubleshooting beforehand. It’s under warranty and I already sent it back to gateway once, but I think they only pretended to reinstall, since it came back with 6k file fragments and whatever piece of scumware that is locking my index.dat files is still operating. Anyway, my plan was to bring up a command prompt, type “format C:” and “format D:” and then follow the prompts, but it appears things have gotten more complicated since the days when I understood computers. My first question for the answers community is: How many partitions do I need? I have a 60 GB drive, so space isn’t an issue. I’ve had machines with seperate partitions for the OS and the software, other machines with a seperate partition for the pagefile, and my current machine has a seperate FAT32 restore partition. Should I create a C:, D:, E: and F: drive?
You don’t need to format your drive. When you reinstall, drop the primary partition and re-create it. At that point, you can create whatever partitions you want. Once you create your partitions, you can format them, but you only have to format one of them to install XP.
Nobody can say how many partitions you should use. It is sort of irrelevant anyway. If you create a 20Gb partition for the OS, that would be plenty. That would leave you about 40 for the data files. I wouldn’t partition a 60Gb drive at all, but it is your call.
With multiple partitions, you can put your swap file on a different drive from your OS. So, if you do opt for multiple partitions, remember to do that after you have XP up and running. As I said, it is up to you what drives you create.
Have fun with that.
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